WW 968: Uncharted Territory - Big Changes in the Insider Program

Summary

Windows Weekly 968: "Uncharted Territory – Big Changes in the Insider Program"

Podcast: Windows Weekly (TWiT)
Date: January 29, 2026
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell

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Overview

This episode dives deep into sweeping changes in the Windows Insider Program, the latest in Windows 11 updates (including a rough Patch Tuesday), and the ongoing impact of AI on both consumer and enterprise Microsoft ecosystems. The hosts unpack Microsoft's latest earnings (as they break), Intel's struggles, the influence of AI on software development, and broader industry trends around privacy, layoffs, and automation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Windows Insider Program & Windows 11 Updates

(07:25 – 16:28)

• Insider Channels in Transition:
  Paul details confusion in the Windows Insider build channels:

  • "Last week... there was a beta build but not a dev build. So I speculated at the time, well, maybe dev is moving onto the next thing..." (07:25)
  • Microsoft released nearly identical dev and beta builds, then split them for new testing, possibly signaling 26H1 is on the horizon, despite versions not yet being named as such.

• Patch Tuesday Woes:

  • January's Patch Tuesday update was buggy:
    • Required two separate emergency patches to resolve issues with hibernation, RDP, and apps freezing during file saves to cloud storage.
    • "Apparently this thing was so buggy that they have now had to issue two sets of emergency patches..." (16:28)

• Cross-Device Improvements:

  • Updates to support more Android vendors (Vivo, Honor, Oppo, Samsung, Xiaomi) for cross-device resume (Spotify, Office docs, browser sessions).

• Smart App Control Eased:

  • Now can be toggled on/off in the UI — great for developers often running unsigned or experimental apps.
  • "Developers are probably going to just want to leave it off, frankly, because they’re always testing apps and things..." (13:08, Paul)

• Windows Hello Enhanced Sign-In Security (ESS):

  • New support for external fingerprint readers, making it more feasible for custom desktop builds.

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2. Microsoft Earnings, AI Investments, and Layoffs

(27:09 – 38:14, 132:15 – 139:34)

• Live Earnings Drop:

  • Microsoft’s quarterly results:
    • Revenue: $81.3 billion
    • Net income: $38.5 billion
    • Cloud (Azure) up 29%, Productivity (M365) up 16%; personal computing down 3%, Xbox down 5%
  • "Net income, yeah. $38.5 billion on revenues of $81.3 [billion]." (132:22)
  • Discussion on AI costs: Capex is massive (~$37.5 billion quarterly), but hard to trace profit directly from AI.

• Layoffs Amid Profit:

  • Amazon to cut ~16,000 corporate roles (part of ~30,000 over recent periods).
  • Morale issues flagged at Microsoft amid restructuring and long-term cost control for AI.
  • "Morale is in the tank. Yeah." (64:58, Richard)
  • "It's kind of amazing that there are 30,000 corporate workers to lay off." (64:10, Leo)

• Industry Trend:

  • Earnings, restructuring, and automation tightly linked to containing and hiding the astronomical costs of AI.

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3. Intel’s Struggles and Industry Shifts

(29:37 – 38:55)

• Big Losses, Bleak Outlook:

  • Net loss: $300M on $52.9B annual revenues.
  • PC chip business declining, data center/AI up — but not enough.
  • "If anyone was holding out hope that Intel was going to have some awesome rebound, you might want to just turn this off." (29:37, Paul)

• Reliability Issues:
  Paul and Leo discuss real-world reliability challenges on Intel laptops (power management, peripherals, etc.) with anecdotal evidence Snapdragon-based devices are now more stable.

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4. AI’s Impact on Software Development & User Empowerment

(56:45 – 101:04)

• Rise of "Vibe Coding":
  Regular users are now coding with AI assistants like Claude or ChatGPT to automate tasks, convert data, or make personal utilities in minutes.

  • Leo: "[Claude code] created a program that took everything out of Obsidian and put it into Day One... 300 entries moved over. That's a one-time-only program. I'm never going to use it again." (90:50)

• Apps Are Dead? Long Live Apps:

  • Paul argues the paradigm is shifting from traditional "apps" to disposable, just-in-time, user-coded tools powered by AI and built on semantic, open interfaces.
  • "These are new apps. We've come full circle or we are in the process of coming full circle. It's fascinating to me..." (88:38, Paul)

• Privacy and Reverse Engineering Advocacy:

  • Extended discussion on the need for open, user-controlled computing and how regulatory or geographic workarounds (e.g., pro–reverse engineering jurisdictions) could unlock innovation.

• Subscription/AI Cost Paradox:

  • Both OpenAI and Google debut cut-rate AI plans ($8/mo vs $20+), raising questions about long-term sustainability and future business models.

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5. Miscellaneous Microsoft and Ecosystem News

(105:43 – 110:38)

• Windows App Dev CLI Preview:

  • New command-line tool (WIN app) for building Windows apps, targeting non–Visual Studio, cross-platform, or Electron-type developers.
  • "All right. A tool for people who need to work with Windows but don't live in the Microsoft dev environment." (107:44, Richard)

• Xbox Updates:

  • Refreshed Xbox Cloud Gaming web app interface (possibly prepping for ad-supported tier); Fable getting a multiplatform remake.

• Password Management Picks:

  • Paul’s tip: Use a cross-platform password manager — Bitwarden and Proton Pass recommended for their free tiers and open source posture.

• Whiskey of the Week:

  • Richard spotlights Tullibardine 18 — a Highland single malt, "light and fruity, full of caramel and vanilla" and a value at $140 for an 18-year-old.

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Memorable Quotes & Notable Moments

• Paul on Windows Patch Tuesday Fiasco (16:28):
  "Apparently this thing was so buggy that they have now had to issue two sets of emergency patches..."

• Richard on AI Coding Changes (78:14):
  "Torturing agents has become highly productive. On the other hand, they're wildly productive. What used to be a six week sprint's less than a week in the dev space."

• Leo on the New Era of Computing (100:44):
  "For those of us who've been covering computing as you have and Richard has forever, this is a new era. That's very interesting... It's not boring anymore."

• Paul on the End of Apps (88:38):
  "It's the end of apps, but it's like, long live these new apps. Like, these are new apps. We've come full circle."

• On Morale at Microsoft (64:58):
  "Morale is in the tank. Yeah. Yeah. New threat of another round of layoffs... people are so tired." (Richard)

• Leo on AI-generated Content Realization (28:34):
  "Literally at the top there's a warning from Apple that says this is AI generated content. Well, I've never seen... that before."

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Intro, casual banter: 00:00 – 07:25
• Windows 11 Insider & Patch Tuesday discussion: 07:25 – 16:28
• Patch Tuesday fallout & Microsoft internal changes: 16:28 – 22:08
• Earnings preview & AI impact: 27:09 – 38:55
• Intel, hardware, and reliability chat: 29:37 – 38:55
• AI's user empowerment revolution: 56:45 – 101:04
• Microsoft’s Quarterly Earnings Live Reaction: 132:15 – 139:34

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Tone

• Candid, dryly humorous, sometimes irreverent — hosts are industry veterans ("winners and dozers") used to parsing Microsoft's cryptic moves and sharing war stories.
• Nostalgic yet future-leaning — frequent reflections on past tech eras (home computers, Visual Basic), but clear recognition of AI’s disruption and opportunity.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode marks "uncharted territory" for Microsoft and tech at large — from reshuffled Insider builds and unreliable updates to AI’s reinvention of work, development, and even what "apps" mean. As big tech’s financials, layoffs, and automation strategies collide, the hosts underscore a pivotal moment: the tools for tailoring software (and resisting big tech’s control) are increasingly in the hands of users themselves — powered by AI, but shadowed by the cost, privacy, and societal implications that come with it.

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Listen for:

• Breaking Microsoft earnings with instant analysis
• Lively stories and debates about hardware reliability, privacy, the AI economy, and the culture of computing change
• Practical advice on password management, privacy tools, and a fine whisky recommendation

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End of Summary

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurad is in Mexico City. Richard Campbell's in London, England. I'm here, though, and I'm glad you're here. We'll Talk about Windows 11, that Patch Tuesday update so bad it required two emergency fixes. Earnings come out for Microsoft this week. We'll have the details as they come in. And we're going to talk about AI coding and how it changes everything. All of that's coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 968, recorded Wednesday, January 28, 2026. Uncharted territory. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, you winners. Nice to see you. And you dozers too. Don't have to wake up for this. It's just Paul Thurat coming to us from Mexico City in beautiful Mexico, where there is no ice storm.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, it got down into the 50s last night. I mean, it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, that is chill.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, my goodness.

[Leo Laporte]

Got to put on a Sarah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wear a long sleeve shirt. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, meanwhile, back in Makunji, it's probably still sub zero.

[Paul Thurrott]

I handed my phone to this guy we know in a bar last night to show him the weather back home, and he was looking at it and he goes, is this Fahrenheit?

[Leo Laporte]

It's a big deal, actually. When it gets to 40 below, it doesn't matter, does it?

[Richard Campbell]

It crosses over.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, who knows that? Mr. Richard Campbell, because he's from Canada, joining us now from the other country that uses imperial measurements sometimes. Have they gone to metric in the uk?

[Richard Campbell]

They have. Officially. They're a metric, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's only us in Liberia, I think now in North Korea too. And North. Well, North Korea.

[Paul Thurrott]

Good company. Good company, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

When you get your airplanes from North Korea, you got to make sure you use imperial socket wrenches.

[Paul Thurrott]

Good to know.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll keep that in mind. Will you?

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like Amazon should mention that, you know, at the time of purchase.

[Leo Laporte]

But these socket wrenches are from North Korea. That is Richard Campbell from Runasradio.com. what are you in London? Londinia.

[Richard Campbell]

London, yeah. I'm in Westminster. Like literally a stone's throw from Parliament.

[Leo Laporte]

The Elizabeth Towers right out your window.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, well, we're at the Queenie To Convention center, which I've shot at before, although I've gone back to the hotel now because if you recall, the last time I did it there, they missed me and locked the building up with me in it. And what did you do? I don't even like 11 o' clock at night. There was one security guard left on, so I started walking around, realizing I couldn't get out. He saw me on the camera and tracked me down and then led me out the employees entrance. And there was much chastisement in the morning of you. Yeah, the comments.

[Leo Laporte]

You were the one locked in. You were the victim here.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think when you were here, Richard, that you. We ever brought you up to the. Something just made a sound.

[Leo Laporte]

The roof.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know. Wherever my phone is probably. Anywho, I don't think he went up to the roof, but we have this roof thing and the door, if you will, if you close it behind you, just locks and you can't get out. There's no key on the. Even though there's a key to get in, there's no key to get out. So that's where our storage is and everything. Right. So every time I'm kind of weird about it, like I. Because I'm thinking if I get locked up here, you want to bring your phone, you know, so you can call.

[Richard Campbell]

Someone, make sure you have your phone.

[Paul Thurrott]

But we were just watching TV last night and we heard this girl or someone go upstairs and Stephanie looked and she usually the guard goes and makes rounds, but she was just going upstairs and you could hear opening the door, slammed the door shut. And I'm like, yep, she's going to get locked in. And she got something out of her storage and then she went over and you could hear up there going, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like she got really excited and I went up there and I was like. She was like, thank you. I'm like, no, we know it's going to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Been there.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we heard you.

[Paul Thurrott]

We knew it was that happening. She might have been up there for hours otherwise if we weren't around.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, if you guys were in town.

[Leo Laporte]

Ladies and gentlemen, we. We want to be grateful for OSHA and other governmental bodies that make sure that there are fire exits at all times.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's an exit, there's four sides. You could go over the side.

[Leo Laporte]

How many states?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, up there, it's the seventh. There's no fire escape or anything like that. There's no ladder, there's no nothing. Nope. Again, if you're lucky, there'll be an earthquake and the building will come down that way you'll get back on the ground. I don't know. Not a lot of good outcomes there.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, all right. Don't go to the roof and.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you have an English breakfast this morning, Richard?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Well, I mean, they have. They have a good breakfast spread in.

[Leo Laporte]

They little blood sausage, some baked tomatoes, beans.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep, all those things. And good toast, but only on one side.

[Leo Laporte]

Cold toast.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. The British invented those racks that you put nice hot toast into and it cools them off optimally, like as rats.

[Richard Campbell]

As possible, so that you no longer have good toast because you want your.

[Paul Thurrott]

Toast of butter ready.

[Richard Campbell]

And as soon as that toast comes out of that rotating toaster, like butter, immediately you want it all melted.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm with you. I'm with you.

[Richard Campbell]

You want poached eggs on and I'm good to go.

[Leo Laporte]

So we are waiting. I'm stalling because we're waiting for Microsoft's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, no, it's not going to happen in time for the beginning of the show. This is going to be an hour and a half later or something.

[Leo Laporte]

Looks like I've taken a hard fall. I'm okay. Thank you. Watch. I did not fall. I must have pounded something. Maybe I was emulating the woman in the upstairs. I could do that, actually. She should have an Apple watch.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just put the Microsoft investor site in dark mode and now I've got Dark Satchel looking at me. It's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Are his eyes laser?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, the whole thing is bizarre.

[Richard Campbell]

It's laser eyes.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, so probably before the show's completely over, we will probably do. We'll get a quick earnings, a quick grab of.

[Richard Campbell]

What do you think?

[Leo Laporte]

Is it going to be a good quarter?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I'm sure it is. I mean, but the, the question, like the question we're going to have about Alphabet and Amazon, too, is just going to be the cost of AI stuff and what that looks like. So we'll see. And how they massage that, because that's going to be.

[Richard Campbell]

What you're really asking is how well are they going to conceal the price of AI in this latest quarter?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, one of the ways concealing it is by firing people.

[Paul Thurrott]

We'll get to that. We're going to get to that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's. Yeah, right. I'm trying not to be cynical about this, but I do feel like they're hiding information.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, we'll. We'll be taking a quick cursory look in about two hours. And then. And then, of course, next week, the Earnings Learnings, the quarterly Earnings Learnings episode, what's Going on in Windows 11?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, last week, you may recall there was a beta build, but not previously on Windows 11 on this bat channel. There was a beta build but not a dev build. So I speculated at the time, well, maybe dev is moving on to the next thing, which would be 26H1. And then several days later they just released the same build to dev for some reason. So I was like, okay, maybe not. But then yesterday came around and they issued, well, three builds but for four channels and they did split dev and beta. So I don't know why they bothered releasing that thing last week. They're not calling dev 26h1. In fact, it's still 25h2, but it's a different, you know, build series, if you will, build number series. So I mean this is very clearly going to be 26H1. I don't know why they do this sometimes, but. But whatever. So they released two separate builds. Right? I want to make sure that's true. Yeah, I think it's two. Yeah, two separate builds, one for dev, one for beta. Both have the same changes. There are no new features, oddly, just fixes. They did say going forward it's likely that these things would remain consistent functionally, which is what we've seen over the past few years. So as it goes to 26H1, 26H2, whatever, we'll have 25H2 with the same features.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

It makes, you know, that's the way that's been. So that was interesting and sort of a confirmation. But then they also released the same KB, the same update for in release preview for 24 and 25H2. So it's the same update, but it updates both to different build numbers. Right. Depending on which you have. And this one is a preview of what patch Tuesday will be like in February. And there are a bunch of new things. I wouldn't say most of these are major. They're mostly improvements to existing features or whatever. I just point out two that I think are semi important. One is Microsoft is really trying to get this cross device functionality going. So cross device resume in this case. And right now I think it depends on your phone, honestly, but it has to be Android. But you can resume Spotify playback, you can resume working on documents in Excel, Word or PowerPoint. You can continue a web browsing session. I think that works with your default browser on either side. But that's kind of up in the air and they're updating that to support more phones. So it's Vivo phones, if using Vivo browser will work with that. And Honor Oppo, Samsung Vivo Xiaomi phones can now resume working with online Microsoft 365 documents in the app.

[Richard Campbell]

I work on Excel spreadsheets on my phone very often. Like, that's. I know, look something up. But actually editing it, like, that's what loop is for. OneNote is for. Goodness.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, same. The brown.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, the Spotify playback thing is cool. Like listening to a podcast in the car, carry the phone inside, comes over the speakers on the PC.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is not in the notes and it's apropos. Nothing in a way, but there's a YouTube music feature that they've just added where if you're listening to something on your phone and you start it on your computer in the. In a web browser on a different device, that thing will. The thing you're playing is supposed to come up as the indicators, press play and keep playing. And to me, this is like that. And I think a lot of us email things to ourselves. Like you might be browsing something on your phone. You're like, I want to save this. Maybe you save it to like, document or. Sorry, these days, be Instant Paper or whatever using. Or you just email the address to yourself and then you go to your computer and then you, you know, paste it in, I guess so. It's obviously Apple does this really well within their own environment, but we don't have anything.

[Richard Campbell]

And the existing. I think somebody just said this in the comments, too. The existing Spotify app says it's just fine. Like, if you run the Spotify app on your PC, it knows on your same account, it knows where you are on the phone.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot I kind of don't like about Spotify, but that's actually one of the really good features. The other one I just wanted to highlight was Smart App Control. So this has been in Windows 11 for a while. Most people don't know about it. People never experience it. But the way it's supposed to work is the first time you sign in on a new install, it runs in the background. And I think it's called experimental mode, or I can't remember the name, the term they use. But it basically looks at what you do running apps, and if it doesn't see anything that it doesn't understand, it will just turn itself on and then you might see it block something. So if you're a developer, you'll see this all the time because there's all kinds of stuff in Visual Studio that will trigger this thing. And the problem with it was that you couldn't toggle it on and off. Technically, you could actually get around this with some registry hacks. But once you turned it off, which you could do, you couldn't turn it on normally, at least not in the ui. And they have enabled. Well, it was grayed out. Right. And they just would. Even though technically you could always kind of do it if you knew how. And I'm sure I had a tip about this at one point. But now with this update, you'll be able to just toggle this thing on and off on the fly. So developers are probably going to just want to leave it off, frankly, because they're always testing apps and things, and that's the type of thing that's going to trigger this warning. But I've even had it blocked. Part of an app one time it literally said that it was part of one of my apps and I'm like, oh, that's fun. So now I can't tell why my app's not running or running properly.

[Richard Campbell]

Correct me if I'm wrong, the smart app Control is the worst possible name here. This is actually a security feature.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Okay. So actually I should say the way that you get to this is to run Windows security and go into app and browser control. It's the top option. And it's not experimental, it's evaluation. What's that thing? So, but on this particular computer, I'm just running unstable. So this thing is off right now because no doubt I was running Visual Studio and ran into the problem. But the other two options on an evaluation are grayed out. My case. So once I get this update and anyone else does. Right. You'll be able to toggle it on the fly. But yeah, it's basically using what Microsoft used to call heuristics, which they probably now call AI because those terms are synonyms to basically look at app behavior and look for anything that might be malicious or suspicious or maybe it's an unsigned app. Those trigger a different warning as well. But. And you know, you'll see it. I mean, I see it all the time because of the developer angle. I think most people probably wouldn't see it, but you could download a random utility from the website. This thing you've been using for years, you just kind of use it and trust it and you don't care. And there's no granular control here. You can't, you know, there's not much you can do like it just kind of blocks it. So if you run into that problem, you might have to use some App all the time that causes it. You might want to just turn it off.

[Richard Campbell]

But yeah. And you know what the difference between Heuristics and AI is?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. One is real.

[Richard Campbell]

Will raise a billion dollars.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're right. Right. Okay. So Heuristics does not have a dollar sign attached to it.

[Richard Campbell]

That's right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Boring.

[Richard Campbell]

What's this old One's a working technology and one will raise a billion dollars.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually, I should mention a third feature because this is a big deal, I think for some people. Windows 11 has a feature called Windows hello, ESS Enhanced Sign In Security. Right. It's on all copilot plus PCs, but it's also on other PCs.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. It's on the screen.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So it doesn't have to be called Pilot PC, but if you get one of those computers, it's automatic. It's the short version, more secure version of Windows Low, I guess is the easiest way to say it. But you can't use it with external devices. So if you have a laptop, it's going to work with the fingerprint reader or the camera that's built into that device. But if you plug something in, it's just not going to work. You can turn it off, you know, ess, so that just works, but now you just have normal hello. And so they've been talking about this, working on this for a while. But there are now Windows hello, ESS compatible external fingerprint readers, or soon will be. And you'll be able to use those with this update.

[Richard Campbell]

And this has always been my idea of how I would build a desktop Copilot plus PC, because you need that ESS feature. So I'd get one of those fingerprint readers.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah. It's neat that you can do that. It's over, I assume USB like you said. And I. I've never seen one, you know, but I'm sure any days. No.

[Richard Campbell]

And there's other problems, too. Like, I also really want a Qualcomm processor and I can't get that on an ATX motherboard at this point.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, Right. Never say never, but probably never. So. But yes, I haven't abandoned all hope.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm just being crushed to death. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Boy.

[Paul Thurrott]

So the January patch Tuesday updates were minor by all accounts. Right. We didn't have a preview update in December, so there were no new features to worry about, which was kind of nice. But apparently this thing was not. Apparently this thing literally was so buggy that they have now had to issue two sets of emergency patches to fix the problems caused by this update. So one can.

[Richard Campbell]

There's only a couple of people working over Christmas trying to make a patch for January and maybe it was bring.

[Paul Thurrott]

Your kid to school day or bring a kid to work day or whatever. I don't. I. Yeah, I can't explain.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see how turn do it, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, maybe. Leila.

[Richard Campbell]

I also get the sense the teams are being realigned right now and, you know, the merger of the. Of core and client, like, there's a lot of. I really get a sense over the past few weeks we're seeing the teams being shuffled around and nobody really knows what they're doing yet.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And a lot of workflow stuff, like everything going into insiders just seems erratic right now. And I think it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, it does.

[Richard Campbell]

People have moved around or left and they didn't leave notes. Right. And you've kind of got a bunch of lost knowledge on the workflows to these various insider pipelines.

[Paul Thurrott]

God, I hope it's not that, but. Yeah, that could be.

[Richard Campbell]

I hate that it's this mundane, but it typically is this mundane. It's literally some God.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it's the mundane stuff that's going to kill you. It's every time. Yeah. So I don't. The first of these came out on the 19th, so that was what, almost two weeks ago, not quite 10 days ago. So a week ago Monday. Not the usual day for an update. Right. But how do you feel about Sunday night? Because they released the second one over the weekend. Right. And the previous one, as I recall, was about computers not going into hibernation or turning off. They would just reboot, remember? In some cases. And there was also a remote desktop bug in there. And then this one has to do with apps becoming unresponsive when they try to save documents or files to cloud storage services. And it's like, guys, what are you doing?

[Richard Campbell]

Testing's a good idea.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And I don't have any memory of them ever having to do this twice with one update. But it's possible, right? I don't want to preclude that possibility, but I don't remember it. Plus, you get that, you know, it's a weekend. Right? You're. This is not like an admin level nightmare. Something's gone wrong in your environment per se. But the guy Laurent who writes the.

[Richard Campbell]

Fixes for Print Nightmare took several iterations, but that was the security vulnerability.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. This is not right. This is not crowdstrike, like, whatever, but. But for individuals. This is your little insight into what that might be like Right. Where, you know, in my case, I'm getting texts by the guy I work with on Sunday. It's like I never hear from him. I'm on Sunday, what's going on? And, and yeah, sure enough, I. You have to. And you. This is a rebootable thing. You have to install it and reboot. I actually told my wife you might want to do something you never do, which is look for updates and get that thing fixed, you know, so well.

[Richard Campbell]

And suddenly we're back to that whole, shouldn't I just wait a week before I do that update?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, can you or does it just.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no, you, you, you can defer to some degree, but you are going to take it. This is the thing. Right? You're going to take it doesn't matter.

[Leo Laporte]

You're going to like it. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you don't have to like it. They don't care about that. But you do have to take it. But yeah, you can. You know, back when this started, this would have been the early 2000s. I remember Brian Livingston, who I was working on the Secrets books with. His policy was really hardcore. It was like, you are not installing anything from Windows Update. I was like, yeah, I don't, I don't agree with that. Yeah. And there were, like, there were. Yeah, we're. There were still raw feelings. I think at the time over there was a particularly bad. I think it was Windows 2000 SP4, if I remember correctly. Maybe SP2 that everyone talked about for 10 years, you know, as the low point, you know, and other issues, of course. I mean there always are. But I. This is one of those good ways, the bad type things to me, I think, I think you're better off.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it's certainly been a thread on run as for servers especially that the risk of a zero day is now higher than the risk of a bad patch.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And how widespread were these issues? I mean, they weren't that widespread. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

These particular issues were not, I don't think are particularly bad. I mean. Well, let me. In the sense that this is not a zero day.

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Some people would have noticed nothing. Right, right. I think a lot of people.

[Leo Laporte]

Most people, I think especially with the first one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, first. Especially the first one. But this one, I saw this across all my PCs, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you did?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah. I mean, I saw the update. I mean, so it did apply to me of the update.

[Leo Laporte]

But you didn't see the problem that it fixed. Not that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, I have so many problems, I don't even notice anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

So.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not sure I'd be a Good.

[Leo Laporte]

You got 99 problems. But this patch Tuesday update.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean, maybe it was. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it's also how much RDP do you do? Right. Because this was mostly affecting rdp, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And I don't do any rdp, especially here. So. No, that was no problem. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Well, I noticed my stock portfolio is back. We'll talk about the earnings that propelled the s and P500 to a record high today in just a little bit. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell, both of whom have fled the country.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, fled is a strong word. It was too far to watch the border. I, you know, it's a.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a matter of interpretation, I guess. I'm still here. I'm still here.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we will Free state of California.

[Leo Laporte]

In the free state of California. You know, it's interesting, you're seeing a lot of people in the neighborhood flying the bare republic flag. The California state flag I guess is a way of saying, yeah, yeah, we're, we're Californians. Anyway, I bought my ice whistles. I'm ready. I'm ready. If we have an ice storm here, I'm ready. But first a word from our sponsor then we will continue on with earnings learnings. Our show today brought to you brand new sponsor want to welcome. I'm thrilled to welcome Trusted Tech. Now you really want to know about TrustedTech? They offer us based Microsoft certified support using a simple ticket based model that helps businesses save money and get faster better help and proactive support. They are the number one global replacement to Microsoft Unified support and Trusted Tech will work to get you better service no matter what size business you have. In recognition of that support quality, Trusted Tech was one of the first partners in the world to earn Microsoft's new Solutions partner designation. Congratulations. That's for support. Solutions partner for support announced recently at Ignite in July. Microsoft will implement a significant. Oh you probably. I hope you're aware of this. I hope it's on your radar. A significant price increase is coming for M365 and it's more than just increase in cost. There's a lot of nuance in the licensing. So that's another thing. Trusted Tech does really good. They are experts on Microsoft licensing. So if you need guided Microsoft support that's more straightforward, more predictable and actually responsive, get a free consultation at TrustedTech Team WindowsWeeklyCSS. Okay, it's TrustedTech Team not.com TrustedTech Team Windows Weekly CSS. And as I said, they do support, but they also do licensing and they'll give you a consultation on either one. Certainly now is the time before July's increase to check that out. Now I know you know they got the name Trusted Tech, but do you trust them? Well, ask Kevin Turner. Kevin Turner, you know that name? Former Microsoft coo. This is what he said to Trusted Tech. He said you Trusted Tech have an incredible customer reputation and you have to earn that every single day. The relentless focus you guys have on taking care of customers gives them value and differentiates you in the marketplace. End quote. That's a, that's pretty high praise from a guy we all know. Trusted Tech elevates the Microsoft support experience with its certified support services. That's important too. It's certified support services from Microsoft and look who uses Trusted Tech. It's all on the website, but I'll give you some examples. NASA, Netflix, Neuralink, Apple, intel all use Trusted Tech and they all say 32 to 52% compared to the average Microsoft Unified Support Agreement. Trusted Tech's Microsoft certified engineers first respond within 10 minutes. That's they achieve an average 85.7% in house ticket resolution rate and 99.3% customer satisfaction rate. Can't get much better than that. Trusty Tech's flexible ticket based monthly or annual pricing model offers direct escalation to Microsoft from a managed partner. And that's important. They are a managed partner when needed. So you, you get the best of both worlds. Another Great example customer TaylorMade, the principal architect for TaylorMade, says We don't break glass often, but when we do, being able to quickly leverage Trusted Tech's professional services through the CSS program and get immediate engineer level support has been invaluable to us. You probably don't want to ever break the glass, but when you do break glass in emergency, whether you're looking to fine tune your Microsoft 365 licensing, improve the way your organization receives proactive Microsoft support, or both. Trusted Tech offers free consultations to help you understand your options. You owe it to yourself to at least do that. Go to TrustedTech team WindowsWeeklyCSS and submit a form to get in contact with TrustedTech's Microsoft support engineers. That's TrustedTech. Thank you Trusted Tech for your trust in us and we're welcoming you to the Windows Weekly family. Great to have you. TrustedTech Team WindowsWeeklyCSS and now back to the show.

[Paul Thurrott]

Paul, hello again. So not too much on the earnings front yet. Like I said up front. Microsoft will be later today. Apple is this week. It might be Apple might be tomorrow. I assumed that Alphabet and Amazon were also this week, but actually they're next week and then of course they're going to be the hardware companies, you know, Nvidia, AMD and Intel was the one that has released earnings so far. That's all I got. So next week's going to be terrible, but we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

It's been good so far, hasn't it?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I mean for me. Oh, for you. Like having to write personally, yes, this is terrible to write up, but. And PC makers, which kind of follow. But a.

[Leo Laporte]

This is actually a really good place to use AI. I think it's quite good for me.

[Paul Thurrott]

To use AI too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you're going to still want to write it, I guess, but AI is really useful for just analyzing.

[Paul Thurrott]

You've reminded me. I point. I, I was reading Apple News the other morning on my iPad and there was a, There's a section on the main page that's local news and of course the storm is happening back home at the time and it was Lehigh Valley, blah, blah, blah, some inches of snow, whatever it was. And so I clicked on it just to kind of see what was going on. And literally at the top there's a warning from Apple that says this is AI generated content. Well, I've never seen, I've never seen that before.

[Leo Laporte]

So interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

I read through this article and I thought, I don't, I don't think I ever would have noticed.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think you could tell anymore. You know, Apple used to get in a lot of trouble for the Apple Intelligence news summaries, right? Because it's things like know Luigi Manon's dead, stuff like that. And I have to say I left them on because I thought they were hilarious. But they're really, at this point, they're reliable, they're pretty robust.

[Paul Thurrott]

This was a. Not a thousand words, but maybe 700 words of whatever. And I, it's amazing. It read very normally to me.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I think we're really enter. This is going to be an interesting year. We're entering a year where AI, all of these things we didn't like about AI, the hallucinations, the, you know, the weird, you know, anodyne, the hand six.

[Paul Thurrott]

Fingers, the, you know, all that weird.

[Leo Laporte]

Stuff, the 12 finger, all of that seems to be getting better. The companies are working really hard to fix that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think this always seemed like solvable problem stuff to me, but yeah, it's definitely getting there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

If anyone was holding out hope that intel was going to have some awesome rebound, you might want to just turn this off for about the next two minutes. Last year was a disaster for this company. The most recent quarter was a disaster. So net loss is $600 million on revenues of 13.7 billion in the quarter for the year. Net loss of $100 million on revenues. Oh, sorry, sorry. That's the year ago quarter. Sorry, sorry. Net loss of $300 million in revenues of 52.9 billion for the year. Yikes.

[Richard Campbell]

That's single digits, percentage points. There are way larger disasters than this.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but it's not making money.

[Richard Campbell]

It's certainly not making money, but it's kind of stemming the bleed.

[Leo Laporte]

More than half a billion dollars a year. It seems like a long term.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So the interesting notion, I literally updated notion at this before we started the show because it always has to update and it just popped down a little thing. It says, click here to update the latest version.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, no, again, again.

[Paul Thurrott]

Something bad just happened out there.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, it was the girl trying to get off the roof promptly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, she landed.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you let her out?

[Paul Thurrott]

She got to the ground. So the problem for intel is manifold, I guess. But if you look at their major business units, there's only two. Now, client computing is what makes the PC chips, right? Their revenues were down 7%. Revenues for the year were down 3% year over year. The rest of intel is actually doing better. They could have done more on the Data center and AI side, right? So that business had 4.7 billion in revenues in the quarter. So it's about half the size of the PC business now, but I bet that changes. But that's up 9% year over year. And for the year, their revenues were up 5% year over year. So that's going pretty well. And then even Intel Foundry, which by the way, zero customers, is doing better year over year, you know, which is kind of interesting, right? So the Intel Foundry business is reported as if it were a separate business, but four point. Oh, sorry, yeah, 4.5 billion in revenue. So about equal to the data center AI business, which is up 4% year over year. And then 17.8 billion for the year, up 3% year over year. Unfortunately, it is also warned, intel, that is has warned that the current quarter will not meet expectations. And you know, their stock price, which had been flying high since the investment, which I added air quotes to, if you're not watching this, just fell through the floor because there's no. I, I don't know. I think There's a future here for the foundry if they can get that off the ground. I mean there were no.

[Richard Campbell]

So you just saying the investment didn't work or the money didn't arrive? Like what's wrong with the.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think the expectation was intel is back, baby. There was this kind of irrational exuberance, I think about intel for some reason I, you know, I'm not a financial.

[Richard Campbell]

Analyst club up and running in Arizona that's actually making current generation chips, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah, sort of. I mean, you know. Yes, but most of those latest Panther like chips are actually still made by tsmc, right. I mean they assemble them in Arizona, but I don't know. Yeah, they'll get there or they won't. I don't really care. But I vaguely sort of agree that we need competition in space. There are rumors that now that Nvidia is prepping their long awaited entry into the Windows and ARM field with several PC makers, you know, coming on board as well, that's going to be super interesting, if only because Nvidia graphics are obviously fairly amazing. So we'll see what happens with that. But you know, and AMD is going really gangbusters honestly in the PC space too. So if x86 is still your thing for some reason, there's a good option there. I don't know about Intel. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

All right, it sounds like they need a couple more quarters that they're really going to turn the ship around. But at least they're, you know, they are executing the plan. They have stripped the company down and focused on the two business models and yeah, doing all the things now can they need money.

[Paul Thurrott]

They need badly to announce a win though, like a major, really do.

[Richard Campbell]

And they clearly did not.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Yeah, we'll see. This all.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean the Panther Lake chip looks good, but there's been a lot of problems with the chips no matter where they were made.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, yep. No, they've had design problems for a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you mean? But what are the. How do those manifest?

[Paul Thurrott]

Is it reliability problems? They just die? Well, the chips don't just die, but I mean you just run into reliability problems. This is something. Before they went to Carolta, I was pointing this out. In fact, I think it started here because I was starting to use USB docks and stuff and there was something about, I want to say it was either 11th and 12th or 12th and 13th gen where I had huge reliability problems on docs and no one else saw this, no one else said anything about it. I, you know, I Kind of moved on.

[Leo Laporte]

But the problem is it's subtle. Right. So you don't know where it's coming from.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And the response of intel when you run into these problems is to simply replace the chips. Like they don't hum and haw around. They know they get an RMA claim on a problem and then the new chip has.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but so that assumes that you bought a chip, right? So most people buy a computer and that puts the PC maker on the line for support. And that's the same relationship Microsoft with Windows has with you, which is, yeah, you have some chip in there, but the, the other factor for reliability or anything else with these chips of course is the PC maker because they're on the hook for fixing the bugs that are in these chips. And these chips all have incredible numbers of bugs, but they also make their own hardware. Right. So they have their own, you know, cooling systems and thermal systems and other chipsets that they pick and choose from. And you know, they assemble them on whatever kinds of motherboards they have and whatever. And like they can introduce problems as well. So it's not always clear, you know, where the problem is. But I, you know, moving to Windows on ARM with Snapdragon has been eye opening in my case because then you see what a truly reliable computer looks like and it's, you know, it's nice. And then you realize it's not like this on, you know, I haven't noticed.

[Leo Laporte]

Any issues with my lunar lake, but. So is it all newer?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, there, there are some intel based laptops that for some reason are just fine. Yeah, that's true.

[Leo Laporte]

You may, although you wouldn't really necessarily know, would you? I mean you might, something might crash and you might say, oh, it's the program, when in fact it's the chip.

[Paul Thurrott]

To me the obvious one is what happens when you open the lid.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I mean it sounds stupid, but ideally like with a Mac or a Snapdragon X based computer, it comes right on and it comes right on and it just doesn't just come right on, but the Windows hello kicks in and it finds you. Yeah, yeah, well, using so. But. Right. So the other variables. Fair.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm using Linux.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was gonna say the other variable is the operating system too. Right. But whatever, you know, obviously Microsoft supports all the, you know, modern power management capabilities, etc. Etc.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so fast. I have to really, I'm, you know, it could be, I mean you can't.

[Paul Thurrott]

Doing doing it, but I have to.

[Leo Laporte]

Do it really slow doing it back.

[Paul Thurrott]

To Back is hard. Yeah. The. I'm pretty sure that screen never turned off, but that's okay. I'm not, I'm not blaming intel for this. I'm just. But I see this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, I could see it. Watch. I have to just crack it. You can't. I can't demonstrate it because it's just like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's good. That's what you want. I mean, you want it to be that fast.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so fast that I. Yeah, you don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But I like that about it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I, And I did get used to that with Apple, but this is arguably faster. So that's an intel thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's. I feel like it's an x86 thing, but in my experience, like I do 25 plus laptops every year, the intel ones are the worst. There's no doubt about it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

If it's the Intel, Snapdragon is very good at that. Snapdragon is by far. It's not even close. Like they're in a different planet.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that might be an ARM versus.

[Paul Thurrott]

Could be. That's why I sort of put it on x86. AMD is a little more reliable than intel in my experience. But I also review far more intel computers because that's what's out in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the way Lenovo's designed, this is it. This. It senses the opening, of course, quickly. So I can only have to just do it like this and then it goes up.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So, yeah, I mean there's all these.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's amazing. It means every time it's open, it's. It's on. It's. It's on. You know, it's fully on.

[Paul Thurrott]

And if you leave it open. Right. So if it's sitting on your desk, it probably has presence sensing capability. So that I don't know about because.

[Leo Laporte]

I've turned off the locking.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't. I hate it. Yeah, I turn that off too, honestly, because I find it to be annoying, but I think many, many people would find it to be handy to walk up to the computer, have it turn on, go, hello. And then because it's on now, your Windows lo thing comes on and it sees you and to your mind, that's as instantaneous as that can be. And that's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And hello is pretty quick. I use the fingerprint.

[Paul Thurrott]

It can't be. It depends, you know, that's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It can be.

[Paul Thurrott]

Best case. It is, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, ideally it would see you coming from a distance.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, they do. They can. They can unlock.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

If that's. If that's what you want. I mean, you can configure that.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

You don't. You don't have to use this feature, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. And then. And your co worker can't do that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I turn it off because I'll be. I'll sometimes have two laptops side by side. So I'm doing something over here. And this screen dims because literally I've turned away from it. And I find that to be incredibly annoying.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's why I turn it off. I don't want it to go off unless I close the lid. But because it really. I think, honestly, closing the lid is good because it comes on so fast. That's a very positive way of saying, nope, go to sleep. And opening it up and it's there is all I need. I don't want it to go to sleep when it's open.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Whether it's plugged in or not. And that's partly because it doesn't drain that fast either. I think Lunar Lakes a pretty nice chipset. It's my only experience with it, so I don't know. And I'm not running it out of Windows.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. I know you're the expert. I defer to you.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I will say, you know, Lenovo is the world's biggest PC maker. They have a good relationship with Intel. That's an R Edition thing, which is a further partnership.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So, yeah, they're doing something right. And, you know, back when Surface Gate was happening and Microsoft was having those reliability problems with the. Was it Server Lake? No, Server Lake. Whatever that series of intel chips was, they were blaming intel, and intel was like, no, it's you. You got to fix that. That's on you. And I talked to my friends at various PC makers, I talked to them, and the Lenovo guys were brutal. They were just like, these guys have no idea what they're doing. We, we. We know how to fix these problems.

[Leo Laporte]

They've been doing it.

[Paul Thurrott]

What we do. Yeah. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I have to say intel workstation at home, which was being so flaky, got a firmware update.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. I have to say, with this ThinkPad, it ran long.

[Richard Campbell]

I wasn't home long enough to really believe in it. It ran for the couple of hours I had, but it's like, it's better than it had been. It was landing for minutes. There you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow, that's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that really underscores that it's a ecosystem. And that the operating system, the chipset, and the manufacturer all weigh in.

[Paul Thurrott]

It all matters. Yeah, for sure. 100%. 100%.

[Leo Laporte]

Dell's pretty good. HP is pretty good, right? Lenovo is pretty good.

[Paul Thurrott]

All the big ones are good.

[Leo Laporte]

You were saying that, Richard, you said in the in discord that hello wasn't always either worked or never worked.

[Richard Campbell]

It didn't work, it just fails. Yeah, just this laptop is absolutely.

[Paul Thurrott]

That.

[Richard Campbell]

It's like most times.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's a Surface.

[Richard Campbell]

Pop the machine. Yeah, I pop the machine open, it's just, boom, you're in. It's so quick you don't even notice it. But if you notice it, it isn't going to work.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It's going to ask you for a pin and make it manually log in and tell you about how you haven't set up ESS correctly and you should recuperate.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I love when it says, hey, you know, do you need some help figuring out how to take a picture of your own face, you idiot? Yeah, it's like, no, I think I got this.

[Richard Campbell]

You need some help because, you know, some gremlin hunted you down Again, to.

[Leo Laporte]

Me, that's a flaw in face recognition. I have the same problem on the iPhone. That's why I kind of like fingerprint face recognition. If it were totally reliable, it always worked and was reliable would be the best way.

[Paul Thurrott]

Obviously, my bigger issue in mobile is that you have to use a PIN sometimes, which I hate. Like, it just forces it on you. But I find it works pretty good Most. Most of the time. But again, x86, this just happened. I was just doing this this morning. You know, the one in the lab, every once in a while, one of the laptops, it's always intel, you know, but it doesn't. It's like, maybe something's in front of the camera. Yeah, my face is in front of the camera. Can you just see it? And like, let's go. And then you get the, you know, the. The annoying notification afterwards. It's like, dude, I did this three times. I approved the, you know, the accuracy thing. I rebooted. I did it with glasses. With glasses off. You know, like, could we just maybe work for a change?

[Leo Laporte]

But that's the thing. If it doesn't work, it's more annoying.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, it's just the worst.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Intermittent. It's the worst. Kind of.

[Richard Campbell]

Every time the machine gets in your way, it's annoying.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly. You want it to be transparent. That's why I kind of still. The rumor is that Apple, on its next iPhone, the folding one is going to go fingerprint only. And I actually celebrate that. I think that's great. I mean, fingerprint on the Lenovo works perfectly.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm sure that's a necessity from the form factor.

[Leo Laporte]

It is. Because they can't put a. Yeah. Camera. And the. They don't want to put cameras on both sides because you'd have to have.

[Paul Thurrott]

Two for that to work.

[Leo Laporte]

And they don't want to do that. And I understand that, but I honestly, I'm.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, I'm happy with. Yeah, I like having the choice, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I guess.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, let's take another break because guess what? AI is coming. Plus, we're stalling because we're about an hour away from.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, there's no reason to stall. It's just, you know, probably gotta know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Gotta know. No, I'm very happy. The. All of the losses that I've suffered over the last two weeks in my 401k been returned to me.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Returned to me. I guess it's almost hard. I mean, I don't invest in individual tech stocks for journalistic reasons, but I have index funds like the S&P 500.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, of course.

[Leo Laporte]

They're all so tech heavy now. AI is driving the S&P 500, though. Magnificent seven. AI companies just drive it. So I guess in a way, I am invested in tech. Maybe I should get into something else. You were saying, Richard? There's an EFT minus the Magnificent Seven, which is hysterical. I'm not sure I want to do that either.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to. I want to bet on Silicon Valley a little bit. Don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, there's gonna say. It's like I wish they were better as companies. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish it weren't the. What I'm living on. I wish it weren't my. You know, like, when you get to my age, there's not a lot of time to recover. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

This is it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

This determines whether I'll be living in Mexico, eating from the taco cart, which.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is not a horrible outcome.

[Leo Laporte]

I might want to do that.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm thinking it's a good time. Mexico City. I can't even tell you.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm so jealous.

[Richard Campbell]

Eternal spring weather's always nice and you.

[Leo Laporte]

Get used to the altitude. Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I am altitude sensitive.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I am, too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't like noise or high altitude, so obviously got to be here, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

And when you come to Makanji, it's.

[Richard Campbell]

Like you got here that is SB 500 minus 7.

[Leo Laporte]

What's it called?

[Richard Campbell]

It's called the Defiance X Mag eft.

[Leo Laporte]

The Defiance X Mag eft. Okay. For those who are interested, for those who are defiant. Defiant ones, our show today. Hey, you want to defy I. You want to defy something? Let's defy data brokers. How about that? Let's defy them. Our show today, brought to you by Delete Me. This is the best way to get out of the privacy nightmare that we're all in. If you have ever investigated how much of your personal data is on the Internet, you know, but I don't recommend it. I really don't. Don't enter your name in there, but. But just trust me when I say it's a lot more than you might realize. Your name?

[Paul Thurrott]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Contact info? You bet. Steve Gibson and I searched for our Social Security number a couple of months ago. There was a big data breach and they had a database of all the different data that had been revealed. And Steve and I searched and yes, we found our Social Security numbers. The thing that gets me this is completely legal in the United States. Your home address might be up there, information about your family members. The reason is this is all being compiled by data brokers. And it's a big money business, sold online. They get the data from everybody, your isp, the websites you visit, the purchases you make. They collate that data, they build a dossier on you, and then anyone on the web can buy those private details, including, yes, your Social Security number. And I don't think it takes much imagination to think about what could be done with that. Identity theft, phishing attempts. That's what actually prompted us to use Delete Me at twit. People were impersonating Lisa, our CEO.

[Paul Thurrott]

And.

[Leo Laporte]

It scared the pants off of us because the bad guys not only knew her phone number, but all of her direct reports, their phone numbers. And the more they know about you, the more credible these phishing attempts can be. Right? There's also the issue of doxxing and harassment. Well, you can do something about it. You could do what we did. Protect your privacy with Deleteme. I recommend Deleteme. We use it every. You know, and the nice thing is it's. It's a subscription. It's not a one time. Yes, you could go one time and delete all this stuff. There's more than 500 data brokers. The problem is there's new ones every day. In fact, sometimes what happens with these people, data brokers, is they change their name so that they can go back to business with your data. And I think, I don't know, but I think they also, even though they have a way to delete your form, they're required to, to delete your data. I think they, as soon as you delete it, they go, fine, okay, it's blank. And then they start collecting it again and rebuilding the dossier. So Delete me goes out and removes your personal info from. They know all the data brokers. When there's new ones, they know those. They know exactly where those forms are kept. They know how to do experts on this. You sign up, this is what we did. You provide Delete me with exactly the information you want deleted. You have control over that, and then their experts take it from there. Now here's the thing. We just periodically, every few months we'll get a personalized privacy report showing what Delete me has found, where they found it, and what they removed. So you, so you know this is an ongoing effort and that report always has more data brokers, more stuff. It's like painting the Golden Gate bridge. You get to one end and you have to start over. That's why Delete me is not a one time service. They're always working for you. They're constantly monitoring and removing that personal information you don't want on the Internet. But it works. When Steve and I searched for and found our Social Security numbers, I thought, let me see, let's try it with Lisa. Because we've been using Deleteme for some time. There's no information about her at all in that dump. To put it simply, DeleteMe does all the hard work of wiping your personal information and your company's personal information and your employees personal information and your family's personal information from data broker websites. This is the way to. This is the only way until the United States passes a comprehensive privacy law. Good luck on that. This is the only way to do it. Take control of your data. Keep your private life private. Sign up for DeleteMe. We've got a special discount for individual users. 20% off your delete me plan. But you gotta go to this address. JoinDeleteMe.com TWiT okay? So make sure you use that address. Join DeleteMe.com TWiT JoinEdgeMe.com TWiT Use the promo code TWiT at checkout to get 20% off. This is the only way. JoinDeleteMe.com TWIT Enter the code TWiT at checkout. JoinDeleteMe dot com TWiT Offer code TWiT. We use it. We recommend it. It works. Join EliteMe.com Twitter for code is TWiT. I love it. You know, it's funny because I do ad blockers, of course, as any sane person does, even though we are an ad supported network for a lot of good reasons. So I use NextDNS, but I can't put it on Lisa's machines because she says, I want to see the ads. We're ad supported. I want to see the ads. I want to know what's okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is her job.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, that's her job.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can also. Well, no, you can't. So I just ran into this. Right. So Ad Thrive, which is now called Raptive, I guess, which is the company that serves ads on my site, puts up a blocker that looks like it was written by me, which I love.

[Leo Laporte]

I've seen it. Remember we showed it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. When I browse on mobile. Okay. So I spent some time today trying to configure next DNS to prevent this. And what I realized was, well, I could whitelist thorat.com, but that's not where the ads are coming from. Right. So then you get into that situation where you're like, okay, I'm not going to whitelist for Aptiv. They serve ads everywhere. Like I would just be enabling ads.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, how do you, how do you configure something like that to whitelist something only on certain sites is, I don't believe is a feature. It's kind of an interesting problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me look. Because I did whitelist therot.com on a next DNS and that, by the way, the, the issue went away and I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no switch to the new membership system. This isn't. Which I still have to do. But this, it's not blocking it, it's blocking ads. But it's not keeping me from logging in because I'm. I think I'm logged in.

[Paul Thurrott]

I got you. Okay, so you. This is on your computer though.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Obviously it would be the same. I'll just show you what I, what I did.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I mean, I did it.

[Leo Laporte]

I probably did the same thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I did. I just.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a white list.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Go to allow list. You see, there's the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, no, I, I did. It didn't. Yeah, I didn't saw. Okay, well, maybe I'll try it again. Reboot.

[Leo Laporte]

It allows sub domains. But you're saying that the ad network is not a subdomain.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So these are coming from another company. They are serving ads on my site. Like they serve in many, many sites. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

As all ads are. Are usually from another site. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like, it's not like we have a, you know, look at it. Host ad system or something.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very rare. Most people include, you know, including when we do direct ad insertion.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S. That's coming from a third part. Another. Another place.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'll look at it again. I just. I was waiting for lunch and I was like, I gotta try to figure this out. I can't get on my website. I bet you.

[Leo Laporte]

So you don't use Ublock Origin?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I use next DNS. Okay. But I mean I can toggle it off right. If I have to and do whatever on my site. But that's, that's stupid.

[Leo Laporte]

So you get. When you go to your site. Okay. I'm always logged in because I'm a member, so I probably don't experience.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm also a premium member, but I don't like. It's one of the perks. I don't know. I don't know what's happening anymore. But. But I'll figure it out eventually or I won't. I don't know. We'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So if, if you are a premium member, you don't see ads on theright.com, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, that's correct. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's one of the reasons to become a premium member.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. But it's not just my site. Right. It's the whole world. So I'm trying to block all this tracking that occurs. The 1 pixel things in every email and everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, one thing, I was very annoyed. I've been a trip at Matt member since they. Yeah, since 2009. And all of a sudden I can't get in. I can't even get in to cancel my account. It says.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's blurry. It says you've got an ad blocker and I'm a pro member. I pay for it and I. And it still won't let me in. What I figured out after doing a lot of searching is that if you have Firefox set to strict, it'll block it. So I had to turn and in order to go there and cancel my subscription, which I did because that beefed me a little. Of course I had to turn off my strict ad. My strict content blocking on Firefox. So that annoyed me a little bit.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's no good.

[Leo Laporte]

I found it's probably vibe coded and I'm sure, it'll be gone instantaneously, but I found a replacement that's 10 times better.

[Paul Thurrott]

Then.

[Leo Laporte]

Then trip it Pro.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, then trip it. What's that? If you don't mind. What's the.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, gosh, now I gotta remember the name of it. Yeah, it was. It was. I found it on Reddit. I think it was Teneo. It's a weird name.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

T I N E O AI And I think it. I. I get the sense. I'll tell you why I think it's vibe coded. Okay. This is an example of how you can kind of tell when you go to a site. So it looks good. It's the future of travel planning. Does everything tripit Pro does. I found it really is very good at interpreting the emails. You know, you forward your emails from your confirmation emails and it builds an itinerary and all that stuff. The thing that made me a little suspicious, I went to the blog and a lot of posts there, but each one has a different name as the author. Jessica Martin, Emily Rodriguez, Michael Thompson, Ashley Turner, Sarah Mitchell. They're all different. There's not one. And so what I. I think this is a dead giveaway that there's one guy, right, and he had AI generate a blog and each one has its own unique byline.

[Richard Campbell]

So is the whole app AI or is it just the marketing?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's a good question.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I could log in and show you. It does a really. Does a really nice job, I have to say. Oh, I have to. Yeah, I'll log into my bitlock Bit warden and do this. But it does. I would say it does a much. It's better than Tribit Pro. And so I'm gonna let you know what if the guy disappears? Big deal.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

So far it's been doing great. I'll show you the. Oh, it supports passkeys. So I'm going to log in with my passkey and I will show you now that I have done all that. So you forward your emails to it and then it builds a trip. I'll show you the trip that we're building. I built Zero Trust World, did it all automatically for me. It interpreted everything perfectly. Got everything. I was really pleased. This is a very nice. And it's free right now. It's early access, so Tripit, you lost me. As a longtime customer, you lost.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm thinking about leaving thorat.com because of the same age.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, same thing. It must be a better.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, no, no. What was wrong with Tripit in the.

[Leo Laporte]

First place when I went to tripit.com it wouldn't let me in.

[Richard Campbell]

No, see this.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah it now that's because I think. Because I didn't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're not signed in.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, no, it wasn't that. I think I've downgraded my. Yeah, I downgraded my browser privacy if I go to strict, which I want to use.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I think tracking protection is a good thing. Let me see if this. They may have, you know what? They've realized they screwed up. It's not doing it anymore. It was blocking me. It said you have anad blocker IQ, can't let you in anymore.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're bad.

[Richard Campbell]

Wait a second. You're not an ad site.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. I'm a paid. I'm a paid subscriber. Yeah. I've never seen ads on TripIt. So this may be the same thing that happened to you, Paul, in the process of switching over. There may have been issues but I think tripit's looking a little dated. They got purchased by a company called.

[Richard Campbell]

Concur and yeah, they've just been. They put minimal money into it. It's gotten progressively slower. It used to be a time where as. As soon as I flipped my phone back on after landing, there'd be an email from tripit going here's your next gate. Here's your baggage claim location, like everything you needed. And now it generally arrives several hours after I needed it.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you use? Because you of all people would need something like tripit.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, yeah, I use tripit. I mean and pay for it as well. But it is not delivering the quality that.

[Leo Laporte]

Take a look at this. T I N E O A O Tinio.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And then I also use Flighty. I'm sure you use Flighty.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is that the. That might be an iPhone only thing, isn't it Flighty. Thinking of the right thing maybe. I think that one might be iPhone only, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me see. The only app that gets you everything. Yeah, it might be. Yeah. Apple design winner app of the year. Yeah, it might be. What's nice is it picked somehow as soon as I did Tineo it picked up and I don't use Gmail but it picked up that my flights and automatically added it. Flighty is great because it will tell you before the flight the.

[Paul Thurrott]

The people at the counter pretty good about that. I mean it's always been good, you know, better than the airlines in my experience.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, the airlines I will. I'll be listening to, you know my flighty going on My Apple watch says, oh, you're delayed another two hours. And then literally 30 minutes later.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I. Multiple times, I'm. I'm getting my bag out of the overhead thing because we've landed. We're about to get off the plane. I'm usually near the front somewhere. My phone buzzes on my watch or something. I look at. I'm like, good news, everyone. United called me. They said we landed. So, you know, everything's good. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

I do like knowing where my bag at the baggage carousel is. I'm sure you regular travelers don't check bags, but I'm with.

[Paul Thurrott]

I would throw my. Sometimes I have to luggage away before I checked it.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, but I travel with somebody who likes bring.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I'm going to Scotland after this. I brought the check bag for a reason.

[Leo Laporte]

You need it for Scotland because you got to have layers. Yeah, you gotta have rain, you gotta have tweed.

[Richard Campbell]

I need room for bottles.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, and then coming home, you throw out all your underwear and you replace it. That's what Dick D. Bartolo used to do. He would bring. When he traveled, he'd bring his oldest underwear and then leave it in the hotel.

[Paul Thurrott]

Why?

[Leo Laporte]

Because. So he could bring stuff back. Because he'd be gone. Gadget convention. He wasn't bringing whiskey back.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, how big was his underwear? What are we talking about? He just.

[Leo Laporte]

He needed room in his luggage, so he would. I thought it was a clever hack. The only problem is every once in a while, you have to be careful how you throw it out. The hotel staff will package it up and mail it back to you.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've had that happen multiple times, actually. Not that I wasn't doing that, but, you know, they actually sent. They'll send it to you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they'll send it to you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I leave stuff in the hotel all the time. And subterranean. I'm sure you have learned not to do that, Richard, as a. I do.

[Richard Campbell]

The best I can, but it still happens occasionally.

[Leo Laporte]

The most traveled person. I know.

[Richard Campbell]

I have my patterns of behavior too.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, I. I do think thanks to vibe coding, the improvement of these tools like Claude code, we're going to see more and more stuff like this Teneo, which I'm betting is vibe coded from the ground up. And yet, I mean, I can't find any flaws with it. Looking at the Reddit posts, it's. I pretty sure it's one guy. And he. And he just coded the. Maybe he coded some of it up. It's very beautiful. It's interesting. Who knows, you know, who knows what the privacy is? It's some boilerplate privacy statement.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, let's talk a. As long as we're talking AI, let's talk AI.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. We didn't talk about the Amazon layoffs.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. That is a big one. In fact, it's starting today.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazon accidentally. Did you see this? Sent out an email.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Kind of confirming it to all of its employees. Yeah. Good stuff. Well, that's why you want to eliminate humans with AI. I guess so, yeah. That sucks, though. It's too.

[Leo Laporte]

So what do they say?

[Paul Thurrott]

16. 16,000? Yeah. Across Amazon. Some guy on my site was like, this is why I don't spend money at Amazon. And I'm like, you predicted these job losses. Like what?

[Leo Laporte]

They've been doing it all along. I mean, this isn't the first. These are executives, right? These are.

[Paul Thurrott]

Apparently it's across the board. So. Yeah, I don't think it's warehouses too.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hard to.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, six, 16,000 rolls. I mean, how many, how many EVPs can they have? You know, like, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

They're saying it's corporate jobs, which I think means not the ware. Maybe like right in the warehouse. So they laid off, according to Thom.

[Paul Thurrott]

Which I think is a very. You can get into the site. So what does it say?

[Leo Laporte]

They. They laid off 16, 14,000 corporate employees late in late October.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're going to lay off another 16. So this is, this is where they were going. They said around 30,000.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

So there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of amazing that there are 30,000 corporate workers.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

To lay off.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, yeah, they. Obviously, it's a big business. I mean, you know, I, I suppose.

[Leo Laporte]

One and a half million employees according to Thorat.com.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. But the vast majority of those are the drivers, warehouse workers, etc. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

350,000 corporate jobs.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's less than 10%.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't remember. Maybe Richard knows off the top of his head, the, the number at Microsoft has grown tremendously in the last several years, but it's got to be somewhere in the 150. 200,000.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Somewhere in there.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, no, it's 200. 220. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

220. Higher.

[Richard Campbell]

And it was flat. You know, the big thing about the annual was that basically employment was flat. For all the layoffs they did. They hired as many people back.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Oh, okay, interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

But you were saying, we were talking before the show, you were saying that you've noticed some morale.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, the morale is in the tank. Yeah. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

New threat of another leather layoffs.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like just.

[Richard Campbell]

People are so tired.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, last year was such a. Just the way they did it. Last year was so terrible.

[Richard Campbell]

Was so horrible.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I'm sure there was a master plan there somewhere. I'm just not privy to it.

[Leo Laporte]

But you have to wonder, though, if a company has hundreds of thousands of managers.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Well, you're saying managers, but it, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think janitors.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but there are still actual employees. You know, like you, you have teams of people. I don't think it's all, I guess. Oh, yeah, you're management layers necessarily. I mean, you have whatever teams working on whatever projects. I don't know. I, they do a lot of stuff. They. There's. It's a, A big complex company. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know most of it, which I do not care about. But I'm always, you know, you don't want to see people get laid off, obviously.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, especially. You said record profits too.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. Well, this is. Right. So I, Maybe you guys know, maybe there's a term for this and I just don't know what it is, but invariably. So I'll just make something up here. Like, I'll. You write a story like, Microsoft, fix this problem with Outlook. Right. There's a million to choose from, but whatever. They fixed one problem. You'll always get the feedback from someone who's like, okay, but what about. And it's like, okay, those things are not related. They're not the same team. Obviously, it's not. Whatever. Like, I, it's not. They didn't not do that because they were doing this. You know, it's kind of hard to say. So I don't know what you call that. Like, it's like, so the record profit thing, it's like, oh, you know, Amazon could have funded their salaries and health plans for perpetuity with the money they just made, you know, from profits. But it's like, are these things actually related? Like, I don't, I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

It's like, well, you want to presume that the employees working at the company are part of the strategy that made the money. So, yeah. Now that you're making records amounts of money from your existing staff, do you really.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, but, but is it these guys? I mean, this is the thing we don't really know. Like, it's kind of hard to say. Like, I, Maybe these were People working in a part of the company or parts of, in many parts of the company that were underperforming or, or overemployed or whatever it might be, however you want to say it.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's not. I don't headcount per se because they kind of kept the headcount in the same place so they really allocated them to different locations. Are they hiring less expensive people? Like, like, it's hard to know all of this, but yeah, you know, generally you have companies struggling when they do layoffs. Not, you know, just knocking out of the park quarter after quarter.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is the new math. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's bizarre. But this is going to come up every single time. So Microsoft today will eventually release their earnings and it'll be like, well then why did you lay off whatever number of people the past year? It's like, well, I don't know know. It's, I don't know. We're always going to have this conversation.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And it seems to be this element of just keeping the employees afraid that they could be laid off at any time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Such a good strategy, you know, it worked great for the Empire in Star Wars. What's the other example? That's it.

[Richard Campbell]

Uncle Satcha put out the letter saying I understand you demoralized and then put Judson AD Hoff in charge and continued on. Like they actually do anything about. Your people are demoralized.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. If only they could figure out why, you know. Yeah. Like what happened?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's weird. Like something happened. It's the strangest thing. It is very strange. All right, what do we have for AI? We have AI stuff. A couple of ignites ago, Microsoft announced their first what they called AI accelerator. So a processor for the data center called Maya. Maya 100 was the first gen. This past week or the other day they announced the Maya 200, the second generation chip. So optimized for inferencing 3 nanometer process from TSMC, by the way, lots of numbers. I don't know but basically if you.

[Richard Campbell]

Accept that big chips are like, they're like side plate size, they're bent for servers.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, these are.

[Richard Campbell]

It's only in their data center.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, you don't need a microscope to see this thing. It's, it's pretty big but apparently it's the, you know, three times as fast at 4.4 bit, sorry, floating point performance compared to the latest Amazon Trainium. And it exceeds, but we don't know how much, probably by a small single digit percentage the eight bit floating point performance of Google's seventh generation TPUs, which is the chips those folks use in their own data centers. So basically the big number here I guess is 30% better performance per dollar than the latest.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're not talking per watt anymore. Yeah. Over their previous channel. Yeah. I don't know a lot about this stuff, but yeah, but yeah, they've already, they've already.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm glad they're comparing it to the Amazon chip and the Google chip because it's not like the Nvidia chips. You can't buy these, you can only rent them, their servers.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. If you go to the Google cloud or you go to the Amazon whatever. The Amazon cloud, whatever that's called, you go to Microsoft with Azure obviously. Yeah. They're going to be running a lot of this stuff on their own hardware. Right. And it's been deployed in the U.S. u.S. West 3 data center region near Phoenix is going online next and then it will, you know, spread to their other data centers around the world. So. Okay, that's nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Good to see a second generation of these chips because many times when these tech companies got into getting fab work done, it's a one time thing, they do it, they are unhappy with the results and they move on. And in this case it's like, nope, that worked. We've got a third more out of the next generation which is a reasonable improvement in the architecture. Great, keep iterating.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just sort of wonder if this would have. Well, see the thing is I feel like Amazon a bit, but also Google specifically, they, they've kind of always done their own thing with chips. Like Microsoft might have been happy to stick with Nvidia forever if Google's on.

[Richard Campbell]

Seventh gen where Microsoft's on two.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Yeah, yeah, no, they've been doing that for a while. I mean that's their, you know, back. They were building, cobbling together servers when they first started the company.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Kind of the thing.

[Richard Campbell]

They were, they were commercial servers. I never perfectly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, right. They weren't like white box PCs except some of them probably were. But. But whatever. Anyway. Yeah, but they've been making their own chips for a long time. I don't want to spend too much time on this, but if you are an Apple fan and waiting for Cyr to do something more than just light your phone up to be pink and purple, There'll be a 26.4 release soon, February and beta and then, you know, whatever that is. April probably for the broad Release and this is the release that will finally deliver on the Siri features they promised at WWDC 24 back in June. 2024.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. The great Smoke and Mirrors demo.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah, fake it till you make it. It's taken them a lot longer to make it than they anticipated. But then they're going to do the full overhaul thing and both these will be using Gemini in the back end and that's coming in the next release of all their platforms and September. So yeah, they're gonna have a little chat, but stuff will be fun.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I hope it's, it'll be really interesting. Good. Like I kind of like Apple coming late to this game, picking the best of the bunch, then doing what they think their customers expect.

[Paul Thurrott]

I haven't written this yet, but I have this story idea that's basically it was always going to be Google like, you know, as they kind of face planted and face raked and whatever. When Microsoft came up with what eventually they called Copilot, I was, you know, it was very common for people to make fun of them and like, oh, they did it. You know, they've been caught with their pants down, they're dead, blah blah blah. And I was like, yeah, I don't know, they, they pretty much own the online experience. Like I, they have so much data, the search thing is so key. I know it can be scraped to some degree, etc. Etc. Obviously. But I just always felt like they were on the leading edge of this stuff to begin with. With deep mind.

[Richard Campbell]

Let's be clear. OpenAI was invented, invented to try and keep beat back Google Brain who was in the lead back in 2015. Yeah, like that's where all of this comes from. And so yeah, you know, they did respond and you know, and it delivered a phenomenal product.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah. So yeah, anyway, I just feel like we should not have discounted them necessarily. But now they're looking like geniuses as well.

[Richard Campbell]

Let's see. You know, there's plenty of opportunities to fail still. You just got to give them time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not like LLMs are great. Like I'm really interested in the governments that, the governance that Apple's going to put around this thing in Siri that's going to keep people from doing bad things. You know, when do we get the story of someone, you know, killing their dog because Siri told them to? Like that's, that's what I'm interested to see is how the heck did they, I mean Apple users allow this psychosis problem to happen through their Product.

[Paul Thurrott]

We'll see. I don't know. We'll see. Yeah, we'll see. One thing I'm a couple of like kind of AI related kind of just thoughts I guess is, and the first one's the smaller two. But we all know that cloud based AI is dramatically more effective today than local AI. We also know it's dramatically more expensive, like exponentially more expensive. It's interesting to me that in the past week or two, let's call it 10 days, OpenAI and now Google have both introduced lower cost versions of their respective AI solutions, you know like the chatbots or whatever in like major western markets. Right. It's one thing to go to India or Mexico or something and say look, we understand the financial situation here isn't what it is in the United States or Western Europe. We're going to have a version for you that's low cost. But they're actually doing, they're both doing this everywhere. And the OR roughly everywhere. When OpenAI did this with ChatGPT go the big news was oh, and we're going to have ads like that's how we're going to help make up part of the financial loss. But Google today, or yesterday maybe yesterday announced a lower cost AI plan. So they have those Google AI whatever plans, right? So the mainstream one is basically it's a Google one plan. So you get two terabytes of storage but you get really good writes across all their Gemini stuff and all the integration with apps and all blah blah, blah, whatever. But now they have one that is so that's $20 a month and then they have more expensive obviously business plans, et cetera, et cetera. But now they have a what is like what used to be like a 200 gig, it still is but storage plan but with Gemini rights across the board that you don't get some things obviously you get lower numbers, et cetera, et cetera, you know, 7.99amonth and that gets like these price. And ChatGPT go I want to say is pretty similar. I think it's the 5 $6 range, I don't remember. But these things, you know, at some point it's like, yeah, no, I'm sorry, it's $8 a month, so same price. And you're like okay, well this is less than half the price of this thing. I think a lot of people would be on the fence about yet another 20 per month subscription of whatever kind, right. They might not use it that much anyway. And they're like, okay, like I wonder, I wonder why this is possible and I don't think that this is going to solve the problem of the cost of AI. Like, I don't, I don't think that's.

[Richard Campbell]

Two possible reasons here. One is you're thinking the $20 number was a barrier. So let's go find out and make a non $20 one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Another possibility is you've analyzed the traffic from various kinds of customers and realize there is a lower stratum customer that we can charge that because they're costing us less. Which I think is less likely. I think. Yeah, I think your momentum of subscript subscribers are falling off. So you're now testing if a sub$10 price tag has helps. Yeah, and interesting that it does. But you know, both are possible.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I'm not either. I mean, I'm kind of confused by this frankly. But I, but that's why I raised this issue is just kind of because.

[Richard Campbell]

There'S another thing that happens after you make that plan, which is you make the $20 plan go to become a $30 plan.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, they have a $200 plan, so there is. How many plans do we need? Yeah, I mean we pay as you go. Make any sense in the A space? I don't know. Probably not.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, that's part of the battle. I'm dealing with folks that have four or five all you can eat plans because they run multiple agents against each other nonstop and have anthropic calling them going, why are you using this many tokens on your all you can eat plan?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, because I have an all you can eat plan, that's why.

[Richard Campbell]

And yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I'm going to pin it to.

[Richard Campbell]

The wall until I actually see your servers catch fire. Right. They're literally running an agent generating tests against a prompt set, another agent writing the code and they're reading back and forth to each other and feeding the problems back until they finish. And that 2430 hour runs like that with your all you can eat plan generates a lot of code. On the other hand, they're wildly productive. Like what used to be a six week sprints, less than a week in the dev space. Torturing agents has become highly productive.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh boy. Interesting. Well, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

And so it's like, hey, $1,000 a month for five of these. Worth every penny. Goodness knows what it's actually going to cost when the real price tag comes down.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Right. Yeah. It doesn't seem like this is.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, no.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

We have this itch about the end of the bubble right in the Beginning of a cost shakeout and real price is starting to appear. And so I mean, I am very glad for the folks I know that are running those all you can eats at this level because they're the guys who bought the all you could eat data plan and said, so how many terabytes is this? Right? Like that's what they're doing as well as getting results.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. And then this is just kind of a, this is almost like an ongoing meandering series of thoughts about AI and whatever. Because you know, like everyone else I'm trying to figure this out in real time. But a couple of months back or I don't remember when I wrote this, who cares? At the time I didn't have the word, but it turns out the word is semantic. But I was talking about the programmatic capability of apps and that they could expose their interfaces so that AI or whatever services can access those capabilities. So we see this in Windows through things like AI actions where you can right click on a file and through a series of right click menus get to something that says paint and then remove the background or something. And then. Okay, and that's kind of interesting. It's kind of interesting. But the real capability there is that Copilot or whatever, AI could also use that interface and then you tell it to do something with an image. And one of the tasks it might do as part of that is to remove the background. It would, you know, use that thing. So there's that. And my, my kind of thought at the time was like, this is like the end of apps, you know. But now we see the AI builders, the main, you know, the big guys starting with ChatGPT or OpenAI with ChatGPT. And now anthropic has done this as well. Microsoft will do this inevitably, which is introduced this notion of apps where you're explicitly making connections with these online services typically, or apps locally if that's, you know, depending on the system. And you can use those data sources as you're talking and interacting with the chatbot. Right. And so the Anthropic version just came online this past week. They have partnerships with a lot of companies I've never sort of heard of myself because I'm just not in the space. But it's amplitude Asana Box I've heard of obviously Canva, Figma and Slack Salesforce, you know, obviously are some of the bigger players in there. But the idea is you're, we're working toward this thing where maybe this is like the interface like this, you know, satya Nadella said Copilot's gonna be like the new start button. So it knows everything about you. If everything about you is in these apps, you know, or if that's part of. Can use that as context as you do things. Right. You can send out agents like this.

[Richard Campbell]

For stuff like an ERP system. Like if you're responsible for accounts receivable. Your job is a series of queries for fetching the data on who owes the company money and how long they've owed them. That could be a set of prompts.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Tied to this, and I think we talked about this last week, is this notion of last year we were talking about vibe coding, and vibe coding was one of those things I. I think we. Everyone kind of misunderstood. The guy who invented the term didn't mean it the way people were using.

[Richard Campbell]

It, but the way it's gotten interpreted now.

[Paul Thurrott]

But now I would say it's caught up to it. So in a sense, people can do the thing you were just describing and make an app. You know what we would. Maybe it's not an app in the traditional sense, but it's an app of sorts. To them, it's an app. It's the thing they go to. To run, to do a thing. And it's something they've invented with their natural language, but they don't know how it's made on the back end. And who cares really? But it does this thing. It could be something silly, like a little game you could make like Pac man game or whatever it is, a lot of versions of that. But it could be something productive, like tying together data from multiple sources, perhaps multiple online services, etc. Etc. But you don't. You're just talking to it. You say, I want this thing that does this thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And I'm fascinated by that.

[Richard Campbell]

In a way, you prompt your way into the equivalent of a mashup up of fetch data from two different sources to give you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Absolutely you could. I. There's no doubt about it. This re. This reminds me of at the dawn of the. What would they now sort of call the personal computing era, before we had the PC, the IBM PC, the personal computer. We used to refer to those first computers as home computers, remember? So Commodore, Atari, Apple, ti, whatever else. Right. There was a. And then obviously Europe had their own companies as well, but there were these early computing platforms. They were all completely or mostly incompatible. And as an enthusiast, like I was a little kid, so when this stuff came out, I was like, oh, my God, I gotta get one of these I gotta do it. I gotta do it. And it was understood that you were going to write your own programs because there maybe weren't a lot of them or you couldn't afford them or whatever it was. And it wasn't sure which of these were going to survive if any turns out actually none of them, but whatever. And that was part of it. And so there was a real enthusiast thing to it that I feel maybe went away. I think Visual Basic was like the last dying gasp of that, and then that was kind of the end of it, right? I mean, at some point, you just go into Best Buy and walking down racks and racks of professional, you know, apps and games, and then eventually you just download anything for free or whatever from the Internet. So, you know, the enthusiast angle kind of died. You see it a little bit in the Raspberry PI space, right, with creators and makers and things, which I think is really cool, trying to bring that element of it back. But I feel like this, without the technical requirement, right? Like, you don't have to be. You don't have to say, look, all right, I want to write this game or this app, whatever it is, so I'm gonna have to learn basic. It's going to be Microsoft basic. It's gross, you know, whatever. And it's going to take a long time. You can just skip that step, right? You can just say, look, I want this thing, you know, that does this thing. And I. And it's not. It's. It's more mainstream in the sense that, you know, it doesn't require an enthusiast mindset. You. You. You're just trying to get stuff done.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's a different kind of enthusiasm, an enthusiasm for crafting prompts and building feedback loops to know if you're doing things correctly, like, think it's all doable. I could see clubs forming around that, the same way we did around basic. And it's just a different way of.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, this is actually. Yes. So this is actually, to me, the most important component of it. It's the. I'll just call it the kind of community aspect because there will be, for lack of a better term, stores, you know, or catalogs or whatever, where. Because you're basically just creating a prompt. Literally, I guess, creating a prompt.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is something you can easily share with anybody. So you could, you know, you'd have to make something up, but someone does a really good job of making, like, the travel app that Leo was showing or whatever. So someone else could take the prompt that makes that thing and say, okay, this is good for this thing, but I want to use something. I want something like this for something else. And it's easy to tailor the prompt to your own needs.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me give you an example, because I've done exactly that. We have a user group, by the way, where we talk about this kind of stuff every first Friday in the club. But remember, I created that program for myself, just for myself, using Claude code that was. I call it Beat Check. Now it's an RSS reader, but it has very simplified UI that allows me to very quickly, every morning, go through, you know, dozens of RSS feeds and say, yeah, this one, this one, this one, this one, and tell it which show it's for and all that. So I think this is soon going to be the standard for this. And I think a lot of people are doing this. You post it on GitHub, you say, it's personal. This is a, you know, this is, I say, an opinionated TUI reader. But I post not only the code that Claude wrote, but all of the Claude conversations, everything that Claude would need to basically clone this and start over. And then you could say to it, okay, Claude, I didn't like what Leo did with this. Or let's add this command here.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean, just check, whatever. Just change one thing, make it mine, turn it into something. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

So, but here, I think this is.

[Leo Laporte]

Going on right now.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think. No, no, it is. No, I'm not. I didn't mean this to be. I didn't mean this to be speculative. What I'm saying is this is what's happening and I'm fascinated by this because a, it reaches out to. It's going to impact mainstream people. But you got to remember, we have this whole industry right on the PC side. The notion of, like, what we would call native apps is going away. There's no doubt about it. There's no reason for Microsoft to create a modern framework for Windows. It just doesn't make sense. It'll never do it. There's no audience for this. It just. It does not exist on the mobile side. We have this. These gatekeepers that have their app stores, and this is a primary revenue source. It's a big problem. And Apple, you know, there was part of the US antitrust case against Apple was their artificial behaviors toward what they were calling super apps. So things like WeChat that are apps that run apps inside of the apps, right? Little apps, mini apps inside the apps. And that's what these are, essentially. And so this is the type of thing, plus the regulation and antitrust stuff that's happened already and is continuing that kind of chips away at that. And I feel like in the sense that, like, it's the end of apps, but it's like, long live these new apps. Like, these are new apps.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, we're many more of them.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we've come full circle or we are in the process of coming full circle. It's fascinating to me because when you talk about AI, you will say things like, you don't have to know exactly the commands or the whatever to make it do something, it just has to understand your intent. And it's getting, getting really good at that and you apply it to this kind of thing. So instead of, you know, setting up a new iPhone or something, we're like, okay, I need Gmail, I need Google Maps, I need whatever apps I use, right? You're like, I just need an app I want to have. This is going to be an app that gives me all the notifications for email across messaging things, services, blah, blah, blah. And like, I think the notion of these like silos, essentially, it's going to be interesting to see what happens. Like, I feel like it's, I feel like it's going to go away.

[Richard Campbell]

Very disruptive. And there's. I don't think it's all apps. I think there's certain forms over data has been threatened by the low code, no code tools for quite some time now.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, it's really hard to justify, doesn't it?

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the thing. But AI is to no code, low code that we've had over many, many years. As I would say Snapdragon X is to like PC processors, processors, where it failed, it failed, it failed. And then when it finally succeeds, you're like, it can't be true. Let's figure out the problem. Something's wrong. You're not telling us something, but it's a miracle because it works incredibly well. And I feel like that's where it's going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll give you another example because, you know, as I've been using cloud code, I come up with more things. So I, I have Obsidian, but I also have a journaling program called Day One that's on the Apple and I've used both kind of casually. And I thought, you know, what I'd really like to do is get all of the posts that I put in one into the other. And I'm sure there's a way to do this. And so I said, claude code, would you do some research, find out if there's an API, figure out how to do this. Within 10 minutes it had written a program that took everything out of Obsidian, put it into day one, automatically converted it did the whole thing. It tested it with one thing. It said, does this look right? I said, yeah, it's 300 entries moved over. That's a one time only program. I'm never going to use it again.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. This is like a playlist mover app, you know, that moves between the different services.

[Leo Laporte]

You could write it now in 10 minutes.

[Paul Thurrott]

100%, in fact, that might. The example I just gave does exist. Like people, you know, I've done this a lot. I've tried to move playlists between whatever services. I have various problems because I use YouTube music, where a lot of my music and playlists is actually YouTube videos and they work as songs in YouTube music. But the other services don't know what to do with this. And you can just go to ChatGPT and say, just here's a playlist, turn it and turn it into one for this other service. Just it works. But you start thinking differently. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

The key is that there is on the Internet, an almost infinite treasure trove of blog posts, GitHub entries, API description that Claude can search for. Now, this is one thing MCP has changed. Can find, can learn, ingest and write something.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's because we have all, for the last 30 years, been assiduously putting everything we could think of up on the Internet.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I feel like this is going to change things pretty dramatically. Like, we'll see there are all kinds of outcomes. I mean, big tech is not going to go down without kicking and screaming, of course, and so we'll see what happens. But I feel like on the desktop we've pretty much given up anyway and mobile's going to be the biggest point.

[Richard Campbell]

And we just have this explosion of software.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's what I think.

[Richard Campbell]

It's conversation with a few shops now where it says, like, how much software never gets to the requirements phase because it's just not the resources or just not high enough priority.

[Paul Thurrott]

You as a person just say, okay, I want to, you know, Leo uses Obsidian, you know, I use Notion, you could use Joplin and the other million things that are just like our loop or whatever. But you might experiment with the app and like, oh, it doesn't do this the way I lie. Or this doesn't do this. I can't, whatever the thing is. So in the future, you know, you could just, you're like, look, I want this thing, but I want it to do this one thing different and you just make your own rendition of it. And I, I, I, that is transformative. I mean that's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

I think, Yeah, I think the world is kind of catching on. This is the, the exact conversation because.

[Paul Thurrott]

It doesn't happening and it doesn't require the white lab coat guy, the scientist who knows all the hard stuff. Like it just is something people, general users.

[Leo Laporte]

Yet it's still, I think if you're.

[Paul Thurrott]

Technical, you know, you could do it right now. If you're technical.

[Leo Laporte]

For sure, it's a certain amount of.

[Paul Thurrott]

To some degree technical skill, I think. But I think that eventually that barrier comes down. You can see, you can see that it's going to come down. Oh yeah, that's, I feel like it's.

[Richard Campbell]

It'S like getting good at searching. Right? I mean, that's the key.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, but also. Yeah, so you know, Dave Plumber, the guy did a, provided a prompt to, I think it was chat GPT Make a Pet sold style Notepad app in C and C. And it was, I'm not saying it was perfect, but it looked, I mean it looked identical, you know, to Notepad. It was kind of amazing. And so you want to do that kind of thing. You're like, all right, so I like notion, but I don't want this, this and this. And I do want the ability to save the files locally, make it, you know. And I know that it sounds like science fiction. It's like, like in the Matrix, right? They're running across the rooftop and they, they dial in and like I need a helicopter and also I need to know how to fly that helicopter. And they're like on it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's exactly like that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right? I mean that's, this is, I mean that's, that was the height of science fiction in 1997 or whatever. Yeah, that movie came out.

[Leo Laporte]

But we're gonna see this. And what it is, is really something that was a holy grail for computing from day one, which is natural language interface to computing. And we got better and better. We started with assembly language, then we got higher level languages that were more English. Like we talked about this last week. Then there was HyperCard and you know, that all.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

And we are now at the point where English, which was always the holy grail, is the programming language, ironically the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hardest of the programming languages. But.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, because it's ambiguous.

[Paul Thurrott]

But if you know it. Okay, fine, if you know, if you know it, you're good.

[Richard Campbell]

Look at the pro Level devs, love, love, you know, sophistication of prompts or doing this multi agent approach. These are pages and pages. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

But this stuff will build on that and that's the point. Like in other words, people have gone to the trouble to do this work and you'll soon be able to just say I want this. It's like when you make an image, right. You say this is very good. But. And I don't know why we talked to the AI, like that's stupid but. But I do this all the time. I really like this. Very nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good job, good job nailing it.

[Paul Thurrott]

One little bit of feedback. But you go in and you're like, well remove the person from the beach or you know, add this sun or something, whatever it is. And ideally it takes that image and makes that one change. And this is the same. Sorry, the same process. Right. But for creating, you know, again, apps. I'm not sure apps are the right word, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, we need a better word actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, tools.

[Leo Laporte]

They're just little tools.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, they're little.

[Leo Laporte]

Have a workbench that you can create your own tools at. And some of them are tools you use day in and day out and some of them are tools you use once and throw away. One of the things that's very interesting. Harper Reed was telling us this on intelligent machines by the way, when we. In about an hour, Intelligent machines. We're going to interview the president of the Mozilla Foundation.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh nice.

[Leo Laporte]

They have just announced a big initiative.

[Paul Thurrott]

A really, a really good interview with him.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm trying to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sorry, I can't remember the publication Ink or something like it. Really, it's worth reading.

[Leo Laporte]

They're doing some very interesting stuff. Anyway, we thought we'd get them on because they have a new kind of AI charter about how they're going to handle AI that I think is really right on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway, ask him about the Rebel Alliance.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what they call it. The rebel. He wants to be the Rebel Alliance.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's one of the terms he is using.

[Leo Laporte]

But Harper Reed was saying that the thing that you've got to learn about Claude code is it's disposable. That what you're creating is disposable.

[Paul Thurrott]

Which is fine. Right. I mean think about it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's key because if it doesn't work or you don't like it, you should just start over.

[Paul Thurrott]

It. It was cheap to make three years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Ish.

[Paul Thurrott]

I went through this huge process of organizing all of my photos across all the services, bring them all in use several apps to do different things around metadata and naming of files and, and putting them in folders, blah, blah, blah. And right now I think I could do, anyone could do this, like here's my photos, organize them in folders and it would just happen and I wouldn't have to have paid for a couple of those apps or found them and experimented and found ones that didn't work quite as well or whatever it was like it was, it's just gonna do it. And this is, I know this is already when you talk about this, it's like every, every AI complaint comes down to like what about the jobs, you know, what about the programmers?

[Leo Laporte]

You're not going to hire somebody to do that. You're not going to pay for a program to do that. You're going to bang your head against the table for a while to do it.

[Paul Thurrott]

And oftentimes it really is that one time thing, like my photo thing. I mean I actually do an annual thing too but for a lot of people that would be a one time deal or the playlist move thing. You're like, I don't want to think, I don't want to invest in a playlist app. I just want this to be there and I don't want to think about it and I certainly don't want to think about it tomorrow. Yeah, there's so many things that fall into this.

[Leo Laporte]

I had Claude, I was downloading images from my icloud to the Linux box, but of course they're in exif format and the Linux box wants JPEG and various programs want jpeg. So I said, claude, from now on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Write a little automatically.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, write a little script for me that downloads the photos, converts them to jpeg. You know, you could say resize them, whatever you want. And it knows. Oh yeah, I will. He says, said, you know, I can use Image Magic. I can use, Sometimes they'll ask you. I, I like Claude to ask me, so what do you want to use Image Magic for this? I said, okay. He said, you know, there's another way to do this. It's faster and simpler. And I said, oh, what? And do that right? It knows it, it wrote it, it's just a little bash script. It's kind of. And I would, I could probably have spent time figuring that out.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Or not.

[Paul Thurrott]

Or, or you could have a life, you know. Yeah, I mean I, you know, this is, and this is the thing, like I, I mean you could, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been working on this, a secondary effect of this is it makes your stuff, your computing platform, whether you're mobile or your laptop or your desktop more useful to you. And suddenly now we're in a kind of a new world where there's a. More of a partnership between you and your computing devices.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, Right. I'm fascinated by this. We'll see. But I really feel like this is a big thing and it's happening and I think it's going to continue to be big.

[Leo Laporte]

I keep thinking of the Terminator line. We were in uncharted territory making things up as we went along.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sorry, was that the Elizabeth Holm biography or the.

[Leo Laporte]

It's.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's this.

[Richard Campbell]

We were in uncharted territory now, making.

[Paul Thurrott]

Up history as we went along.

[Leo Laporte]

And of course that was because of Skynet. Right? That's still a possibility.

[Richard Campbell]

But science fiction, well, that's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

There's all this dystopian stuff around this conditions.

[Richard Campbell]

Because it makes for good tv.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. When things just work. That's the most boring movie ever made.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like a day in a life everybody lived happily. Every night you're like, is anything going to happen? No, everything's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

It was wonderful. The end.

[Leo Laporte]

No conflict. Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, it's just what you want in real life, but it's not what you want.

[Leo Laporte]

We've been. We've been talking about this and I just. I mean, I'm glad we do intelligent machines. I'm glad you guys are on this. I really feel like this is for those of us who've been covering computing as you have and Richard has forever, since practically the beginning. This is a new era. That's very interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Things are different.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's not boring anymore.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me take a little break. We will talk more about development. We've got Xboxes, we've got, I'm sure, some luscious elixirs of the gods. Some meads coming up in just a little bit.

[Richard Campbell]

I had a yummy last weekend.

[Leo Laporte]

A yummy. Richard is practically in the home of all of this.

[Richard Campbell]

Being in going up this weekend, the uk.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul's got a brass mug of something delicious.

[Paul Thurrott]

It looks good.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you get Poke? Can you just go get Pokemon?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, I could, but I have taste buds. I know it's not for everyone.

[Leo Laporte]

Our show today brought to you by. You just saw me use it. Bitwarden is the trusted leader in passwords, pass keys and secret management. You can use, for instance, and this is a cool thing they just added a couple of months ago. You can have it generate your public and private SSH keys and then keep them the keys for you and even provide the public key on demand when you log into your SSH server. How about that? Bitwarden is. It's because they're like us, they're people like us and they know what we want. And that's one of the reasons I love it, because it's open source. So there's new features being added all the time. Consistently ranked number one in user satisfaction by G2 and software reviews. There are over 10 million users across 180 countries and more than 50,000 businesses globally that use Bitwarden. One of the things I like to do in the Bitwarden ads is talk about new features as they add them because there's so many of them and most of them you won't want to use. But some of them might hit your sweet spot. Whether you're protecting one account, your own, or thousands at your business, Bitwarden keeps you secure all year long, constantly adding new features like for business. The new Bitwarden Access intelligence organizations can use this to detect weak, reused or exposed credentials and immediately guide remediation, replacing risky passwords with strong unique ones. Now this closes a major security gap. Credentials, as you, I'm sure know, remain like the top cause of breaches. Credential stuffing. You know, you get the breach, they get your password, they try it in all the accounts. But with access intelligence, these vulnerable passwords become visible, they're prioritized, and then they're corrected before exploitation can occur. Okay, so that's one thing. That's for businesses. How about for you, the individual? How about this? Bitwarden Lite? Bitwarden Lite delivers a lightweight self hosted password manager. So it's great for like home labs, personal projects, environments. You don't want a lot of, you know, you want setup to be quick, minimal overhead. We were talking about AI. Bitwarden has a credential MCP server. Fantastic way to keep your credentials local, but be able to access resources with your AIs. Bitwarden's now enhanced with real time vault health alerts. I use that. I love that. And password coaching features for everyone, not just business, that help users identify those bad passwords and then walk them through the steps. The immediate action to strengthen their security. Bit Warden now supports direct import from Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera and Vivaldi browsers. Direct import copies or imports credentials from the browser into encrypted vaults without requiring a separate plain text export. You know, that's always a little nerve wracking when you export it and it's sitting in that folder and all the passwords are in English. You don't need to do that anymore. If you're importing from your browser just straight over, it simplifies migration, reduces that exposure associated with the manual export and deletion steps. G2 Winter 2025 reports Bitwarden continues to hold strong as number one in every enterprise category for six straight quarters. Bitwarden setup is easy. It supports importing for most password management solutions and they're open source, so that means you can look at it on GitHub. All the source code is there. They're also regularly audited by third party experts. And of course they meet all the security standards. SOC 2 type 2 GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA compliant. They're ISO 27001:2002 certified for your business. Get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan for individuals. Free forever across all devices. Unlimited passwords, passkeys, even hardware keys for individual users. The main point is go to bitwarden.com/bitwarden.com TWIT we thank them so much for their support. Bitwarden.com TWIT now back to the show we go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, this one I don't. Richard, maybe I don't know if you knew this was coming or knew about this or had heard about this in advance, but this past week Microsoft released a public preview of something called the Windows App Development CLI or WIN app. It's a command line tool, Right. Which is designed to simplify the development lifecycle for people who are creating modern Windows apps.

[Richard Campbell]

More importantly, to duplicate what the node guys have.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So I mean, part of me, my two reactions to this because I played with it just a little bit is, you know, having set up computers, a lot of computers actually, in recent years for development purposes in the micro, you know, for Microsoft oriented native apps, I guess, for lack of a better term. Yeah, I mean there are things you got to know and then, you know, things you got to do, et cetera. But I mean, I feel like the people who do this are developers and they can kind of handle that. And I don't quite understand what the issue is, but I also wonder why.

[Richard Campbell]

The tools came down to they need to build a Windows app and they don't use Visual Studio and they don't understand MSbuilder. You know, they want another way to build. You know, you're making Electron app clients for phones and you want to make the Windows version and you don't taught your name. Microsoft Dev Tools.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. So if you're doing a JavaScript type thing in Electron, this is more like. It's the scenario. Yeah. It's the folder based thing rather than like a big Visual Studio project. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Because it does work with anyway, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yes. I mean coming from that part of.

[Richard Campbell]

The world, it's why they have the Azure CLI too is I want to push to the cloud and I'm not firing up Studio for this. I just want to do it from the command line.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Okay. I was just kind of confused by it.

[Richard Campbell]

But I and I would just argue like this is not for you. You work in the Microsoft dev environment, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

All right. A tool for people who need to work with Windows but don't live in the Microsoft dev environment.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. I accept.

[Richard Campbell]

It literally is a response to customers that are using Microsoft Tools.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right. And then Xbox and gaming. Just a couple of things. The other day Microsoft refreshed the Xbox cloud gaming web experience. Right. So if you go to I think it's xbox.com play, it's nice looking. I'm not sure it's all that different. I don't spend a lot of time there because I don't, you know, streaming the types of games I play as a non starter. But. Okay. And the first thing that went through my brain was this is a rumor, not a fact. But there were rumors within the past couple of weeks that Microsoft was going to introduce an ad based Xbox cloud gaming tier. And I wonder if that might be tied to this because there's no super change to how it looks or works. I mean it's tagging mechanisms to allowed.

[Richard Campbell]

An ad network to function perhaps.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And then there's also this notion that Microsoft is consolidating their Xbox UIs and maybe this becomes the UI for everybody right across the board. So whatever consoles look like in the near future on the Xbox side or just the Xbox app on PC, which kind of looks like this in a way, I'm sure. And by the way, it's probably a web app, but. But whatever. And then the other one is just that fable which is being I guess remade. I guess is the way to say the remake.

[Richard Campbell]

Great Xbox games. That isn't Halo. Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And it was a fairy tale game.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the name's Weird Fable.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. It's like a open world RPG sorcery kind of game.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I might want to play that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you're going to be able to because they're putting it everywhere. So this Was what? You know, like everything else that Xbox does these days, it will be on Xbox, PC and PS5. Right. It was the biggest game they showed off at that developer direct event last week. It was the finale, actually. It looks beautiful. I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it does. This is like Fable Remastered or something. Yeah, it looks like Unreal Engine. It's beautiful.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it looks like the opening scene of the Fellowship of the Ring, you know, like the movie. Yeah, it looks neat. So we don't have an exact release date, but it is coming this fall and across.

[Richard Campbell]

They've committed to all the platforms for it too.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Yep. That looks great. I'm sure There was a PS5 footage you were seeing. They wanted to look so good.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. Anyway.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Well, that was the shortest Xbox segment in, in the history of the world.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Sometimes it's long, sometimes it's this. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let me just, you know, take, take a little tiny time out just to tell people to join the club. Join the club. Join the club. Club twit. 10 bucks a month, which I know that's a lot, but you get all of the shows ad free and, and it's not just the many shows we do, you know, as our big shows like Twit and Windows Weekly and Mac Break Weekly and Intelligent Machines and you know, Tech News Weekly with Micah Sargent. But it's also all the club shows. You get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is really a great place to hang out whether you're in a show or not. I mean, there's always great conversations. You get all of those club shows like the AI User Group we're going to do tomorrow. It's Johnny Jett, the return of Johnny Jett, our travel guru, to talk about traveling better with technology. Friday, Stacy's Book Club. And it's really good. It's a fun book. It's called the Theft of Hollow London.

[Paul Thurrott]

London.

[Leo Laporte]

And the best thing, it's Sci fi book. But it's like Brave New World meets Ocean's Eleven. It's in the future, but it is a caper book and I'm really enjoying it. I think you will too. So join us for that conversation on Friday. Those are some of the things we do all the time. Micah's Crafting Corner. But the most important thing to know about Club Twit is without it, we would have to cut back. We would have to get rid of shows, get rid of staff. We would have to sometimes do our shows in the dark because we couldn't play the power bill. Increasingly Club Twit is the future of Twit. And that means we need you to join. If we got right now it's about one and a half percent, 2% of the audience, if we got 3 or 4% of the audience, we wouldn't have to worry about advertising. We wouldn't even, probably wouldn't even do advertising. We could do more content, we could hire more people and I want to do that, I really do. So if you will. Twit TV Club Twit. Would you join the club? We would, we would love to have you. Twit TV Club Twit. Please think of the children or no, that makes no sense. Just join the club, will you please? All right, now let's do the tip of the week. It's time for the back of the book.

[Richard Campbell]

Woo hoo.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul Thurot.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So related to I'm sure what I talked about last week. I've been doing an ongoing kind of security series this month. You know, it's January, blah blah, blah, whatever. So I'm finally tackling the big one, which is password management. And you know, most of this, you guys, everyone knows this but you know, you want the 1Password manager, not 18 of them like we all actually have. You want to get rid of your password, passwords and everything else from the other ones you're no longer using. You want to set this thing up to work everywhere you are, which is your computer, your mobile devices, whatever, autofill, turn off the stuff built in to the system, whether it's a web browser or your platform, just use the one thing, right? Most password managers just all do the same, you know, things. Right. But be sure to choose one that does like all the things, right? Passkey management, payment management, proactive scanning of your accounts and vulnerabilities, dark web leaks, et cetera. One of the. This is time consuming and it's terrible. But having it change your passwords to longer, more complex passwords. Good. Or helping you through that, it can't just change in most cases. But identifying accounts that support authenticator apps or other two FA means passkeys, whatever. But you haven't configured it on those accounts key. They also just store arbitrary information now, right? So it could be anything like photos, files, documents, whatever. And then some kind of emergency for.

[Richard Campbell]

BitLocker, things like that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. Tied to this. Oh, and it should work everywhere you are, right. So you know, Apple has their thing. But that's great if you're an Apple and only an Apple. It's not, you know, it's not Going to work or work well. If you're using, you know, Chrome on a Chromebook or something like, you want to make sure the thing you're using works everywhere. From an app perspective, there are many good password managers. I don't actually understand why 1Password is so popular. I find the interface to be kind of screw in. They almost mandate like having what is essentially like a 2Password thing for it, which I think is kind of weird. But Bid Warden is a great choice. My. My personal choice is Proton Pass and that's my pick of the week, I should say. Those two are the only ones that are available in free versions that actually work really, really well. And if you choose to pay, they're inexpensive. The other ones that are good are, well, highly rated anyway. Like 1Password or a Dashlane are not free. They don't have free versions, but. And none of them are super expensive. But this is something you might be paying for every year to some degree, but you can get away with not paying with Bitwarden and Proton Pass, if that matters to you. And then, you know, I guess if you have to, you could use the Google Password Manager because it's built into Chrome, all their platforms. You can use it for autofill in that browser on Windows. You can use it for autofill in apps and in web pages on mobile, like even on an iPhone, obviously. So that would work.

[Leo Laporte]

Proton's to be praised because they did. It was only last year they open sourced all of the Proton applications, which I think is right to be trustworthy, especially nowadays. You want to know that?

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. I actually, I write about Proton a lot and I think it might have been in the context of their Authenticator app, which is.

[Leo Laporte]

I started using it, by the way, based on your recommendation. Yeah, very happy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And someone said, well, I mean, can we trust a company this small? I was like, that's kind of the point. Get this stuff off the big companies. The better question maybe is, can we trust these big companies?

[Leo Laporte]

And I think, well, you know what's happening in Europe. We had Patrick Beja from France on Twitter on Sunday and he said there is a concerted effort in Europe to get off of American technology.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. This is Cory Doctorow's new pushes for the, what he calls the post American Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

He wants Canada to become.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think he's smart. I don't know if Canada will do this. In fact, I know they won't. But he wants them to kind of abrogate all the agreements that they have with the intellectual property world.

[Paul Thurrott]

Intellectual Property organization because we are violating the tariff laws that they might.

[Leo Laporte]

They might be pissed off enough to do that. And if they. So what he wants is for. If the reason, you know, WIPO went around at the behest of the United States to every country in the world and said, no, you got to make sure reverse engineering is made.

[Paul Thurrott]

Reverse engineering is key to all of this. This is the.

[Leo Laporte]

He says, if there were one country that just said, look, you can reverse engineer here. We're not going to. We're not going to do that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, my God. That would be the.

[Leo Laporte]

All of this stuff could be reverse engineers.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. This is. You can use the ink you want in the printer you want. You can fix your own tractor or you can, you know, whatever it is.

[Richard Campbell]

Canada, it might be Ukraine, you know, it might be.

[Leo Laporte]

It could be the Bahamas. It doesn't. It's just. There needs to be one jurisdiction in the world that is not enforcing this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Reverse engineering prohibition and advertising it as we're going to. You can do whatever you want here with that. With regards to reverse engineering.

[Leo Laporte]

It could be the Bahamas. When I was in NASA many years ago, they said, we want to become a data free zone. We think our, you know, we understand that we have no economy. It's not. It's tourism and that's it.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. A free zone.

[Leo Laporte]

If we became. He said, we used to be a place for pirates.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right. I don't understand. I don't. I'm not a legal expert of any kind, of course, but I. One of the, the center confusions I have here is we have specific laws in the United States around ownership. And so you could say something like, well, this is my iPhone. I own this phone. This is my phone. But once you make anything that could be reverse engineered, part of it, the DMCA kicks in and now you can't. This is. Now you can't do what you want to your device. I don't understand why that supersedes my right of ownership as an individual. Like, I just don't understand. How does that take precedent? I mean, they just artificially create Eulas and software systems specifically. So it would have to be reverse engineered for you to do what you want. Yeah, sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

This is the right to repair laws.

[Leo Laporte]

It is.

[Richard Campbell]

It should be fixable and it should be.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish somebody do this. I want something that's. It doesn't have to be as good as the iPhone, but close to as good as the iPhone.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Or the Pixel. I think we're really open.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like this is inevitable. It's just there's going to be so much pushback and it's going to take a while. But I. Yeah, why some company hasn't stepped up. The EU should just do this. Look, the whole point of the tariff thing was that we're going to, you know, we will have something like the DMCA because you require that. But now you're just overcharging us on tariffs. So guess what? You're violating that agreement. We're going to violate the agreement and not reverse engineer your technology.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's a good example.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what happens.

[Leo Laporte]

This little mini E Ink reader. It's a little Chinese device from XTE Inc. And it has a magnet on it. It clips to the back of your phone and then you can read your. Let me boot it up. You can read your books on it. It's a little teeny weeny thing, but its software is crappy Chinese crappy software. So somebody wrote something called Crosspoint. It's really great and it's easy to firmware update it. And now I have an E Ink open E Ink reader that can read all epub stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

Little.

[Leo Laporte]

It's little, but I can keep it in my shirt pocket.

[Paul Thurrott]

See if your phone could use that as a secondary screen and send like the Kindle app to it or something. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I use Calibre, Caliber has web sync.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So we have these open source ecosystems that sort of exist. All of this DMCA stuff keeps a lid on it. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't understand why. And if I literally have no idea why this is even allowed, I don't understand it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I know why. Because I'm sorry.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

I know exactly why.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, I don't know why we as a people, why do we put up with it? I understand why those companies want this.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think the world economic, you know, for a while we were in this kind of. I thought it was pretty good.

[Paul Thurrott]

As an American, I thought it was pretty freaking good.

[Leo Laporte]

Milton Friedman, free trade. Everything's free trade. You know, whoever makes it best sells it to whoever doesn't make it. And it was actually pretty good. That's why we have the iPhone. We have all this stuff and now we're not. We're shutting it all down. We're closed. Putting up the walls, putting up the borders. This is the time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. For the rest of the world to step up. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Step up, somebody. I'm not rooting against the US by any means, but I am rooting for users.

[Paul Thurrott]

This would benefit the citizens of the United States as much as it would benefit citizens of any other country.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this is. Yes, this. When you, someone who is patriotic might hear the phrase, like the post American Internet, you don't get freak out. It's like, dude, you know, this is going to be better for us. So I don't know why we're rooting for companies, we should be rooting for people.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there you go. I think we're kind of. The tech lash is real.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

AI is kind of throwing a monkey wrench into it.

[Paul Thurrott]

But yes, it's bizarre how much bad has had to happen for us to wake up to the reality of this industry. Yeah, yeah, it's too bad.

[Richard Campbell]

Still resting with whether we're actually awake or not.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's cheer up. Let's talk about Run as radio with Mr. Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

This is a show I shot back in, in Lithuania with my friend Ian Cooper, who's here with me in London too. I just saw him a little earlier and he's. Well, you can say about Ian, he's one of those polyglot sort of architects, the kind of guys like, look, we're going to be able to do this together, let's go build the thing and so forth forth. He works for a company called Just Eat, which runs a bunch of the infrastructure for delivery of food services and things in and around the uk. And so business process automation, which is a common phrase in the IT world, is just this idea of anything I've got to repeat multiple times, I should automate it so that it's perfectly repeatable. There's lots of different tools in this place and what we're really talking about is building automations that are maintainable, that multiple people can use, multiple can work on that over time, they can evolve and improve and so forth. So that's a documentation flow and source control and so forth. And often with these BPA tools, they're sort of done seat of the pants one timers and kind of unmanaged, usable by you, but really no one else. And that creates its own set of problems. So we're trying to talk through the governance side of being responsible with automation so that it can be maintained and to be able to know when things are working properly and when they fail, how they fail and how to recover from them.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, everybody, it's Leo Laporte. It's the last week to take our annual survey. This is so important for us to get to know you better. We thank everybody who's already taken the survey and if you're one of the Few who has not. You have a few days left. Visit our website twit tv survey 26 and fill it out before January 31st. And thank you so much, we appreciate it. Now, let's talk whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. On my way out to this trip up to London, I needed to come in a day early so that I didn't have to rush to the airport and things and fortunate timing. A buddy of mine was having a birthday and also could put me up for the night. So I came, you know, arrived with gift in hand. And that gift was a fine Highland whiskey by the name of Tullibardine the 18. In fact, Tullibardine is not the oldest whiskey and not the oldest distillery in the world. It's in an. It's in Perthshire, which is just north of Edinburgh, about 75 minute in a little town they call Blackford, named supposedly for the fact that a Nordic queen died there in the 10th century trying to ford the river. So they called it Blackford. But if today you would drive out of Edinburgh on the M9 and get up to Blackford, which is where Televardine is, Blackford is famous for the first recorded sale of beer in Scotland. So Telebardine is also a hill and as well as had a castle and things on it as well. And in 1488, King James IV bought beer from that area in Blackford. Barrels of beer for his coronation beer had been made there since the 12th century. The water there, the spring, is absolutely phenomenal. So it was a great beer making place. He was so happy with that beer in 1488 that the first Royal Charter of Scotland ever given was to the brewery there in 1503. So this is super old school and has nothing to do with the whiskey made today, except that you will not notice on a Tullibardin bottle it says 1488. And the only reason is because that's because of King James and his beer. What is at Tullibardin that is that ancient is the Tullibardin Chapel. That chapel was originally built in 1446 and had expanded and so forth until about the 16th century, where it still stands today, largely untouched since the 16th century. And that's where the name Tillabardine for the distillery actually comes from. There were several attempts to open distilleries in that area. So 1798, William and Henry Bannerman started the distillery, but it only ran for about a year and it shut down. But they did name it for the chapel, which at that point was already 300 years old, so that you know they use the name for there. There was another distillery set up in 1814 which ran until 181937 that burned down and wasn't replaced so that by 1900 there are three breweries, two of which are soon about to bankrupt in a maltings facility. The last brewery standing there runs until about 1927 and then all alcohol production stops in the Blackford area until the last distillery standing is bought by William Delm Evans. This is the guy who, who built the Jura distillery and facilities and the Craig Lache. And so in 47 he buys the land that this the shutdown brewery and in 49 starts producing spirit from it. And that's essentially the distillery that stands till this day. A few years on by 1953 William is. Has health problems and so he sells it to the Brody Hepburn Group who run it for 20 years or so. When it gets merged into Invercorating Gordon Distilleries. This is one of those few stories where it's a Scottish distillery not owned by Diageo. In 1971, when Invre Gordon has control of it, they go up to. They double the number of stills, expand the washbacks and so forth. Lot of what is at Tullibard need today comes from the Invergordon expansion. It's acquired by White And Mackie White McKay, which is the blenders. And they use a lot of the. Their intent in acquiring it was to use a lot of the alcohol that was in storage, the laid up barrels for their blends. But they find that a lot of those barrels are in fairly rough shape and not the quality they want in their blends. And so by 1994 they shut everything down and it stays mothballed for almost a decade until a private consortium run by Michael Beamish and Douglas Ross acquired the distillery for maybe a million pounds like a bargain again with a lot of laid up barrels. They had intended to take those old casks and sell them, but they too found they had problems and so actually started running the stills and brought in some specialist distillers and got things up and running again. So that by 2011 they sold it to Picard Vin and Spirits, which is a French conglomerate of wine and spirit making these days, that that group has been reorganized. By 2013 it was called Tororo Distillers. They also own the Highland Queen blend and that's been the controlling interest of Tullibardine ever since. So these, this is nominally a Highland, but it's the very, very southern part of the Highlands, you know, the south side of Edinburgh, you'd be going into the lowlands. So it's kind of its own space. It's not that close to spay. They're big on bourbon casks, but also use a lot of wine casks because they are ultimately owned by a vintner as well. So they have access to a lot of wine casks. Production is a sort of mid scale. 2 million a year. 2 million liters a year with a 6 ton mash ton, 9 washbacks of about 38,000 liters each. They use wooden lids on those 52 hour fermentations. Very middling. Two 20,000 liter wash stills, two 16,000 liter spirit stills. So nothing massive. And again, you'll find many. Most of their whiskey is aged in bourbon casks. They're big on first fill and second fill. So first fill means fresh from, from America, used once, second fill, they've already had scotch in them once and now they're. They're using it again. But most of the first fills and now most of the aging will happen in those remade bourbon casks and then they will do a year or nine months in some kind of finishing cask. Might be sherry, might be any number of the French wines they have access to. Marseille, Sauternes, Burgundy, Pinot. So there's lots of choices there. That is not what happens with this 18. This 18 is almost, it would almost be a speyside in a lot of ways because it is just first fill bourbon. It's finished in sherry and it is very spayish. It is light and fruity, full of caramel and vanilla. And I had brought it as a gift and said you can put this away if you want to keep it. No, no, we'll open it. And we finished it at the party because it was that good. 43% probably has some color in it. They don't say it doesn't, so it probably does. But for an 18 year old, little off the beaten path. Most people haven't heard of Tillabardine because they don't have the marketing budget that a Diageo has. $140, you know, you can barely get there like a Dalmore. Twelve is that price. And this is an 18, 18 year old. So it's a bargain for a nice light drinking island and a beautiful bottle, a beautiful box that it comes in. It's a nice gift and I can't recommend it enough. That's one of the cheapest 18 year olds you'll ever find anywhere in a whiskey.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, just a good find. Very pleased with it. With it and as you can see, the box is pretty with the, you know, old, old picture, you know, drawings of people making whiskey and yeah, just been a ringer, ran easy winger and ever. It was very appreciated by everyone around, so I would recommend it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well now while we've been talking, Paul has been writing because Microsoft's.

[Richard Campbell]

Guess what just happened.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul filed a story while we were talking. I'm impressed, Paul. You're muted still. Is that me or is that you?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, that's me. I'm sorry. Yeah, no, I'm sorry, Richard. I missed your segment because I was busy cobbling this together. But I'm impressed. It's out. Just a quick report and then I do a longer analysis piece later. But Microsoft's doing pretty good. Net income. Yeah. $38.5 billion in revenues of 81.3. I haven't had a chance to look, get into the AI side. Just laid out the basic, you know, three big businesses and I'm ignoring Microsoft Cloud because they made it up. But 17% gain year over year in revenues, productivity and business processes. That's the business that does. Microsoft 365 is again their biggest business, up 16% to 34.1 billion. Intelligent Cloud Azure revenues up 29% to 32.9 billion. So pretty close. And more personal computing to 14.3 billion, a decline of 3%. Revenues from PC makers and devices for Windows were up only 1% and Xbox content and services revenue declined 5%. So I need to dig through their. What do you call it? Presentation and then listen to, or at least read their post earnings conference call, which is probably happening pretty soon. So there'll be more next week, but that's the high level.

[Leo Laporte]

So 60 increase in revenue. In profit?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, 60 in profit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, 60%.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean that's, that might have been.

[Richard Campbell]

Through the roof and it's not.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, 60 is not possible.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, net income of 38. This is profit. 38.5 billion on.

[Paul Thurrott]

So Capex. Capex is a week. Yeah, yeah, they're doing okay. That most business is doing great. Oh my God, they're.

[Leo Laporte]

But the Capex is probably.

[Paul Thurrott]

AI is a, is 100% AI right now. It didn't go up that much quarter over quarter. So remember last year they were saying they were going to come in around 80. I think they came in closer to almost 90 billion. But you can see the, the amount per quarter go up. So it was 24.2 billion and then 34.9 billion in the last two quarters. This quarter was 37.5 so.

[Leo Laporte]

There'S no way of knowing whether they're making money in AI, Though I think we can.

[Paul Thurrott]

Safely say they are not. But. Yeah, there's no. They're not going to.

[Richard Campbell]

But they're not telling us those numbers, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're telling us numbers, but they're all bundled up together. We don't know at the end, and.

[Paul Thurrott]

I didn't do this math, but remember, I don't know, two quarters ago they actually gave an Azure revenue number, which means we've seen the gains each quarter since, which means we can actually come up with the number for this quarter for Azure. I just haven't done that. I have to look it up. I haven't had time for that.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Well, congratulations, Satya.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can go back to blogging or whatever it is you do now that you know.

[Richard Campbell]

I am curious to see how the stock price shakes out here.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think a lot of it's going to depend on what they have to say. So I got to listen to this call and, and I'm curious, I'm really curious.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think the market's skeptical about the 90 billion a year AI investment?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean, I. Yeah, because what you're not seeing is the result at the other end of that where it's like, see, this all made sense. Like, I. Like there's not even a hint of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Instead what you have are people like Sachin, Adele and the people that run all these other companies complaining because we're talking about AI slop and when no one's paying for AI, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah. They're also complaining about stop calling it AI slop.

[Paul Thurrott]

And, and yeah, that's what stop me. Stop making slop. Just stop making slop.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the stock's down quite a bit, actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean, we'll see. You know, they'll. They need to talk about things and we'll see after hours.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, of course the market's closed. That's why they released this at 4.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But 21 bucks down after hours trading. You can see that huge drop and now it's come back up and call is going to happen in.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is not. I wouldn't call what I'm about to say analysis. But what did I say it was? 30, 32.9 billion in capex. 29% gain quarter. No, that must be year over year. And then what did I say their profit was? 38.5. They actually made a bigger profit than they spent on AI infrastructure. So something happened. I don't think it was AI by the way, I think it was a one time a year ago something, something wasn't so great and that might have explained it.

[Leo Laporte]

But one of the things that happened recently in the last couple of weeks is Microsoft say we're going to pay for all of the data centers. We're not going to put the burdens of those data center costs, electricity and water on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but was he doing like this thing behind his back or was he winking a lot or did he have like a twitchy thing going on?

[Leo Laporte]

And there's pay, there's different, there's different ways of people.

[Richard Campbell]

It's also the part of they're using shell companies to set these data centers up. So I suspect we're only going to see this follow those rules when they actually get rolled into Microsoft. Right, right. You know. Right, right. There's a real conversation going on about who's actually building these data centers because all of the big players are using shells.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and there's also concern that these shell companies could be go bankrupt because.

[Richard Campbell]

Could be evaporated intentionally. Like it reminds me of the Undersea Cabling Crisis 2000, 2001.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Where all these shell companies fund it, you know, set up for cables and disappeared before they were finished.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this is space.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's a, it's a strategy. It's a strategy to hide the liability to be able to over order. Right. The old I'm opening 10 windows to buy two tickets to Taylor Swift and you know, only keep one of those windows in the end the rest will disappear. Like there's all these mechanisms that they're using to optimize their ability to build what they want. But they are ordering far more than they need.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Just amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

I can't wait to discuss the studies that should lead to regulation about this is this is disruptive to economies. This is what happens when you have too much money concentrated in one place.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and loopholes like crazy this that you pay CPAs a lot of money to use.

[Paul Thurrott]

As my wife observed, you know, if we were running our business or a little business like OpenAI, we would be called a charity at this point.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Oh well. It's the world as we know it. Paul Thurat, thank you for that last minute update. I knew we would be able to do that next week. Week. Of course we'll spend more times on the earnings learnings. But I think the top line stuff is pretty clear.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean, yeah, I would say not much has changed at the top line.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

This has been the way it's been for the past, I don't know, three.

[Leo Laporte]

Five quarters, whatever Apples are tomorrow. And it's going to be. We were taking wagers on MacBreak weekly whether it'll be Apple's best quarter ever or whether it'll be Apple's best quarter ever.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. It's gonna be. It's pretty. It's gonna be both.

[Leo Laporte]

We're pretty sure it's Apple's best.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm actually super happy that Amazon and Alphabet aren't until the following week.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God.

[Paul Thurrott]

That. Yeah, that is. Having these things dump on me all at the same time is the worst.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So that actually, that, that's good for me. So thank you world, for once. You know, one.

[Leo Laporte]

One liquor segment for you to write up that article. I'm impressed.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it was a quickie.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a pro, ladies and gentlemen.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've written. I've written before once or twice.

[Richard Campbell]

Not his first rodeo. And it was not exactly a long whiskey bit either.

[Paul Thurrott]

No. I was getting nervous at the end because I could tell you were kind of wrapping up and I'm like, oh.

[Leo Laporte]

Man, can we talk about the War of 1812 a little bit more and how it affected.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thank you. I was like, all right, I got two more paragraphs.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul Thurat [e-mail] that's where you'll find his intrepid analysis. Become a premium member. It's absolutely worth it. Great stuff there for everyone. T H U r r o doublegood.com his books are at leanpub.com including the Field Guide to Windows 11 and Windows Everywhere. Some couple of really good [e-mail] Richard Campbell [e-mail] that's where you'll find the run his radio podcast and Net Rocks with Carl Franklin if you're a net fan. And they joined together at the Hip once a week to do this show every Tuesday.

[Richard Campbell]

Sorry Wednesday, Wednesday, Wednesday for run as Thursdays for.net rocks. And to be sure we time shift. So I record recorded advance.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a magic thing. It's a magic.

[Richard Campbell]

It's really great, you know, to know I have all my. I'm recording Run as is tomorrow at the NDC conference for March.

[Leo Laporte]

And by the way, you're going to be going with us to the Zero Trust world that threat lockers putting on in Orlando. And I think you're going to get some interviews there as well.

[Richard Campbell]

We'll pick up a couple of security shows.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm excited. Smart man.

[Richard Campbell]

Get Those I'm efficient. Yes, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, Wednes Day at 11am Pacific. That's 1300 now, 1400 East Coast Time, 1900 UTC. Math is hard. You can watch us live if you want. You don't have to, I mean, we record it after all. But you can, if you wish, watch us live on a variety of platforms. We're in the club Twit Discord for our wonderful club members. Thank you, club members. Thank you, thank you, thank you. But you also can watch, as many club members do, on YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn or Kik. There's chats in many of those. I watch the chat, I see everybody's comments. Thank you. After the fact, on demand versions of the show available at [e-mail], but also at Twitter, TV, WW and on YouTube. There's a video channel on YouTube dedicated to Windows Weekly because we do video as well as audio. So you could go there. That's a good thing for clipping little segments to send off to friends and family. Everybody can watch YouTube after all. The best way to get the show or any of our shows is to find a podcast client you like. There are lots of choices. I like Pocket Casts, but there's many others. And you could just select Windows Weekly. You can do the audio or the video or both if you want. We don't mind. And if you would, if you like the show anyway, give us a nice review. You, wherever you download your podcast from, we appreciate it helps people discover us. There is, as Yarno says in our Discord, there's also a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Whisky called weirdstufffrommyclawset.com Something weird from my closet. Something weird. I never get that right. Something weird.

[Richard Campbell]

It's called Windows Whiskey.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Windows Whiskey. Something weird from my closet dot com. You'll actually go to that playlist that Kevin King's been maintaining of all the.

[Richard Campbell]

Whiskey segments, movements, 112, 111. Like, it's a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Incredible.

[Richard Campbell]

Incredible. Where I think the last one is from the last of my friend Nile's rare collection.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Kevin says a little behind, so he's catching up hunger.

[Richard Campbell]

He's not that far behind. It's like four or five.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a lot of work.

[Richard Campbell]

There's some real good ones coming up though. You know, you as you've already experienced that weird whiskey from the Rusty Rum place, the Lithuanian experience, and the one.

[Leo Laporte]

You should never ever, under any circumstances try.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, every so often we get a dud, don't we? Every so often. Anyway, this weekend I'm headed up to the Mothership. We're going flying to Glasgow, going up, spending the night at the Craig Elache, gonna do the new Macallan Legends tour, hit Ben Dromak and try a few new things. I'll be in the Quaish at the Craig Elache, taking pictures of bottles I've sampled and keeping notes. So is there someone.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have an Instagram or somewhere people could follow that?

[Richard Campbell]

No, that's not. That's not my thing.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Richard Campbell]

No, not even. I share it here. If you want to, you know, keep watching.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll see it all here eventually. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. We will see you next time on Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sa.